【正确答案】Empiricism, in philosophy, refers to the view that all concepts originate in experience, that all concepts are about or applicable to things that can be experienced, or that all rationally acceptable beliefs or propositions are justifiable or knowable only through experience. This broad definition accords with the derivation of the term empiricism from the ancient Greek word empeiria, "experience".
Mentalism, however, is a psychological and philosophical concept picked up and developed by Chomsky (1965) and modeled after Descartes' and von Humboldt's rationalism. Mentalism attempts to describe the internal (innate) language mechanism that provides the basis for the creative aspect of language development and use. In this program, Chomsky turns against the empirical approach of American structuralism (Bloomfield) and, especially, against Skinner's behaviorist interpretation of language (behaviorism), since both positions accept only immediately observable linguistic data as their object of investigation. By limiting the object of investigation to physically perceivable or physically measurable data, linguistic description is reduced to purely surface phenomena.
Empiricism and mentalism adopt different methodologies. In the study of language, empiricists employ the procedure of using actual instances of speech as the starting point for analysis, mentalists, however, adopts a methodology that is hypothesis-deductive, which operates at two levels: a) the linguist formulates a hypothesis about language structure—a general linguistic theory; this is tested by grammars for particular languages; b) each such grammar is a hypothesis on the general linguistic theory.
As far as language learning or acquisition is concerned, the empiricists focus on the native speakers' utterances and try to imitate their speech; while mentalists are interested in any data that can reveal the speaker's tacit knowledge. They seldom use what native speakers actually say; they rely on their own intuition.
In fact, both approaches can only be part of the whole story of language learning. Neither of them can fully explain why people can learn language well. So, it is better to take an eclectic approach by combining all the relevant language learning theories.

【答案解析】[解析] 本题主要考查语言学流派与语言学习之间的关系。答题时一方面要说清什么是mentalism和empiricism，另一方面还要说明两者跟语言学习之间的关系，并在最后对这两种流派的语言学习观适当加以点评。