In Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1131-1136). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Structure dependence in language acquisition: Uncovering the richness of the stimulus.
Structure dependence in language acquisition: Uncovering the richness of the stimulus.
Florencia Reali
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 polar
interrogatives. We develop a series of child-directed corpus
analyses showing that there is indirect statistical information
useful for correct auxiliary fronting in polar interrogatives,
and that such information is sufficient for producing
grammatical 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 to correct aux-questions
when compared to their ungrammatical counterparts. The
results suggest that the basic assumptions of the poverty of
stimulus argument need to be reappraised.
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