Uncovering the Richness of the Stimulus: Structure Dependence and Indirect
Statistical Evidence
Florencia Reali and Morten H. Christiansen
Abstract
The poverty of stimulus argument is one of the most controversial arguments in
the study of language acquisition. Here we follow previous approaches challenging the
assumption of impoverished primary linguistic data, focusing on the specific problem of
auxiliary fronting in complex polar interrogatives. We develop a series of child-directed
speech corpus analyses showing that there is indirect statistical information useful for
correct auxiliary fronting in polar interrogatives, and that such information is sufficient for
distinguishing between grammatical and ungrammatical generalizations, even in the
absence of direct evidence. We further show that there are simple learning devices, such
as neural networks, capable of exploiting such statistical cues, producing a bias toward
correct AUX-questions when compared to their ungrammatical counterparts. The results
suggest that the basic assumptions of the poverty of stimulus argument may need to be
reappraised.
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