The wealth of the stimulus

Abstract For well over a half-century, child language researchers have struggled with Chomsky’s characterization of “the poverty of the stimulus” — the assertion that the child does not receive enough linguistic data to arrive at knowledge of grammatical structure. Whatever one’s conception of linguistic competence, it is clear that the learner has to make use of both innate capacities and linguistic experience to master one or more native languages. This chapter focuses on experience — the speech encountered by the child learner. The past decades of child language research have revealed important ways in which “the stimulus” is really not so “impoverished”. Here I point to several examples of “the wealth of the stimulus” in my own research and that of colleagues. The learner gleans information about language from attending to ways in which linguistic forms change in the course of verbal interaction with others. Interlocutors expand and question children’s utterances; some of those modifications are taken up by learners. Interlocutors press for clarification, demand uptake. They rephrase their speech in successive utterances, offering a wealth of grammatical and lexical variety around a continuing topic. The interlocutors are not only caregivers, but also peers and older children who present different vocabularies and communicative demands. Children are actively engaged in linguistic worlds with many types of speech acts. Eventual explanations of language acquisition will have to attend to realistic descriptions of the rich data available to learners.