Reappraising Poverty of Stimulus Argument: A Corpus Analysis Approach
Florencia Reali & Morten H. Christiansen
Abstract
The poverty of stimulus argument for innateness of grammar is based on the assumption that the information in the environment is not rich enough to allow a human learner to attain adult competence. Auxiliary fronting in polar interrogatives has been taken as strong support for the poverty of stimulus argument. Here we reassess the assumption of absence of evidence for aux-fronting through a corpus analysis of child directed speech. We used bigram/trigram models to compare the probability of correct (Is the lion that is roaring hungry?) and incorrect (Is the lion that roaring is hungry?) hypotheses for auxiliary fronting. We found that the probability of correct aux-question sentences was about twice as high as the incorrect ones. These results show that the statistical information present in the corpus allows selecting the correct fronting hypothesis in the 95% (trigram) and 92% (bigram) of the cases.
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