Poverty of the stimulus? A rational approach

Abstract

The Poverty of the Stimulus (PoS) argument holds that children do not receive enough evidence to infer the exis-tence of core aspects of language, such as the dependence of linguistic rules on hierarchical phrase structure. We reevaluate one version of this argument with a Bayesian model of grammar induction, and show that a rational learner without any initial language-speci¯c biases could learn this dependency given typical child-directed input. This choice enables the learner to master aspects of syn-tax, such as the auxiliary fronting rule in interrogative formation, even without having heard directly relevant data (e.g., interrogatives containing an auxiliary in a relative clause in the subject NP).