Equation 1 · Part 6 · The Language Instinct on Trial: Chomsky, Pinker, and the Pirahã
fraction
fraction
What this part means
Divide the expression above the line by the one below it.
Its job in the formula
The expression above the fraction bar is divided by the complete expression below it. The denominator must not be zero.
Full expression→fraction→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 fraction a/b means a divided by b. The top number is the numerator; the bottom number is the denominator, and it cannot be zero.
Open the illustrated fractions: division written vertically guide →
Sources cited in the surrounding passage
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.