Poverty of the stimulus has been at the heart of ferocious and tear-filled debates at the nexus of psychology, linguistics, and philosophy for decades. This review is intended as a guide for readers without a formal linguistics or philosophy background, focusing on what poverty of the stimulus is and how it's been interpreted, which is…

The "wanna" facts are a classic Poverty of Stimulus (PoS) problem: "Wanna" is grammatical in certain contexts ("Who do you want PRO to play with?") but not others ("Who do you want who[strikethrough] to play with you?"). On a standard analysis, "contraction" to "wanna" is blocked by some…

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of early verb inflection in child Slovenian from morphosyntactic and morphophonological perspectives. It centers on the phenomenon of root nonfinites, particularly the patterns of omission and substitution errors in verb inflection marking. It argues that every acquisition model needs to account…

Outside the core grammar, the set of "peripheral" or marked properties of a language include exceptions or relaxations of the settings of core grammar and the idiosyncratic features of the language governed by particular lexical items. The core/peripheral distinction has direct implications for grammatical development in children. The…

This paper examines two- to five-year-old children's knowledge of inversion in English yes/no questions through a new experimental study. It challenges the view that the syntax for inversion develops slowly in child English and tests the hypothesis that grammatical competence for inversion is present from the earliest testable ages of the child's…

It is argued here that childhood phonological errors systematically simplify the child's inventory of phonetic elements and strings. (Author/KM)

Classic studies in second language (L2) learning offer little evidence for the validity of the notion of universals in L2 learning. The present study investigates this notion in data collected from 15 observational studies of 40 L2 learners who acquired the L2 naturally, that is, they were not taught the language in any formal ways. Interpretation…