Issues in the Study of Input: Finetuning, Universality, Individual and Developmental Differences, and Necessary Causes

Abstract

Claims about the nature of input to language-learning children are central to formulations about any theory of language acquisition. The contention that input was ill-formed, incoherent, and complex constituted a critical argument in Chomsky's original formulation of the nature of LAD: the poverty of the input had to be compensated for by the innate structure available to the language learner. Chomsky's anecdotal evidence for the poverty and degeneracy of the input was quickly challenged by a series of studies designed to provide quantified descriptions of the kinds of speech addressed to young children. The results of those studies are now generally accepted in support of the notion that the speech directed to young children (child directed speech, CDS), whether by adults or older siblings, differs from speech among peers on a variety of dimensions. It is syntactically simpler, more limited in vocabulary and in propositional complexity, more correct, and more fluent. At the formal level, then, such speech can be seen as a simpler, cleaner corpus from which to learn language. In other ways, though, CDS is still quite complex; it displays the full range of conventional indirectness, for example, without the simplification of form-function mapping one might expect. While in general CDS is constrained to the here-and-now and related to the child's focus of attention or ongoing activity, a high proportion of at least some mothers' CDS redirects children's attention and activity, introduces nonpresent referents, and in other ways seems to complicate the task of learning language.

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