Equation 1 · Part 8 · The Language Instinct on Trial: Chomsky, Pinker, and the Pirahã
Denominator: frequency of X
What this part means
The complete quantity below the fraction bar; it must be nonzero for this division.
Its job in the formula
frequency of X is an input to the expression that computes the quantity on the left.
Full expression→Denominator: frequency of X→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.