Tabula rasa e acquisizione del lessico

Abstract: the concept of human mind as a blank slate (or tabula rasa) has been supported for many reasons, not only scientific ones but also political and social reasons. If we are born with no innate ideas, it means that there are no differences between humans and social groups. But the tabula rasa is not a valid scientific theory: basically it does not explain many aspects of human nature, for example why there are natural differences between women and men, why children do not make any kind of linguistic error learning a language or why only humans have a discrete, compositional and infinite language. Anyway, it seems there is a field in which the human mind seems not to have any innate concept: it is the lexical acquisition. The words a child learns depend on the ambient where he grows; but many experiments and studies show that child’s mind has to have some abilities to understand that the sounds he heards are not noise but symbols used by other people.
This paper is divided into two parts: the first one is the more general and it examines the tabula rasa from many points of view and some of the reasons why it has been supported by scientists and intellectuals. Experiments and proofs from various fields of research, from anthropology to neurolinguistics, will be reported to show the poorness of tabula rasa. The second part is the more specific one and it examines the case of lexical learning in children, showing that, although it is a field where an associationist explanation should be the more expectable, the mind is not so blank as supposed.