Empiricist Solutions to Nativist Problems using Tree-Substitution Grammars

While the debate between nativism and empiricism exists since several decades, surprisingly few common learning problems have been proposed for assessing the two opposing views. Most empiricist researchers have focused on a relatively small number of linguistic problems, such as Auxiliary Fronting or Anaphoric One. In the current paper we extend the number of common test cases to a much larger series of problems related to wh-questions, relative clause formation, topicalization, extraposition from NP and left dislocation. We show that these hard cases can be empirically solved by an unsupervised tree-substitution grammar inferred from child-directed input in the Adam corpus (Childes database).