Equation 1 · Part 2 · The Language Instinct on Trial: Chomsky, Pinker, and the Pirahã
Symbol P
What this part means
P is part of the quantity the equation computes from the expression on the right.
Its job in the formula
P is part of the quantity the equation computes from the expression on the right.
Full expression→Symbol P→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
While the recursion debate ran on argument and reanalysis, a separate research program was accumulating experimental results that never claimed to resolve the poverty-of-the-stimulus question but did show that infants arrive with more general-purpose statistical machinery than a strict nativist account had reason to expect. Jenny Saffran, Richard Aslin and Elissa Newport’s 1996 Science paper remains the field’s most cited demonstration. Eight-month-old infants heard two minutes of a continuous, monotone synthetic speech stream built from four made-up three-syllable “words,” with no pauses, stress cues, or other surface markers at word boundaries; the only information available to distinguish…
Learn the underlying idea
A function assigns an output to each allowed input. The expression f(x) means “apply f to x”.
Open the illustrated functions: inputs become outputs guide →
See this notation across published equations →
Sources cited in the surrounding passage
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.