Indirect evidence and the poverty of the stimulus: the case of anaphoric one

Abstract

It is widely held that children’s linguistic input underdetermines the correct grammar, and that language learning must therefore be guided by innate linguistic constraints. In contrast, a recent counterproposal holds that apparently impoverished input may contain indirect sources of evidence that allow the child to learn without such constraints. Here, we support this latter view by showing that a Bayesian model can learn a standard “poverty-of-stimulus” example, anaphoric one, from realistic input without a constraint traditionally assumed to be necessary, by relying on indirect evidence. Our demonstration does however assume other linguistic knowledge; thus we reduce the problem of learning anaphoric one to that of learning this other knowledge. We discuss whether this other knowledge may itself be acquired without linguistic constraints.