Poverty of the Stimulus

The poverty of the stimulus is the claim, within linguistics, that children are not exposed to rich enough linguistic data in their environment to acquire every feature of their language without some innate, language-specific cognitive biases to draw on. The argument is used to support the theory of universal grammar, the idea that certain aspects of a person's competence in language are innate rather than learned purely from exposure. Noam Chomsky coined the term in 1980, and the argument remains debated among linguists, with critics proposing alternative models suggesting that acquiring a language from the available input may be less difficult than poverty-of-the-stimulus arguments assume.