The wealth of the stimulus

Abstract For well over a half-century, child language researchers have struggled with Chomsky’s characterization of “the poverty of the stimulus” — the assertion that the child does not receive enough linguistic data to arrive at knowledge of grammatical structure. Whatever one’s conception of linguistic competence, it is clear that the learner has to make use of both innate capacities and linguistic experience to master one or more native languages. This chapter focuses on experience — the speech encountered by the child learner. The past decades of child language research have revealed important ways in which “the stimulus” is really not so “impoverished”. Here I point to several examples of “the wealth of…