Digital ACT Reading Practice Question #1568

In Passage A, the phrase 'poverty of the stimulus' refers to the idea that children learn grammar despite: Passage A: Linguist Noam Chomsky posited that human language is not merely a cultural invention, but an innate, genetically hardwired cognitive capacity. Chomsky pointed to the 'poverty of the stimulus': children acquire staggeringly complex grammatical rules in early childhood despite receiving incomplete and uncorrected linguistic input. This rapid mastery implies a universal grammar pre-programmed into human neurobiology. Passage B: Anthropological linguists argue that language evolved gradually through social interaction and cultural transmission. Cross-linguistic field surveys reveal immense diversity in syntactic structures across the world's 7,000 languages, with some Amazonian tongues lacking basic features like recursion or numerical quantification. Language, from this perspective, is a cultural tool refined over millennia to facilitate communal cooperation, not a rigid genetic module.