Lisa Pear's meta-analysis on "poverty of the stimulus" (POS) in language development, a notion central to debates in psychology, linguistics, and philosophy. POS essentially argues that the external language data available to children are insufficient or ambiguous to explain how they acquire complex linguistic knowledge, thereby implying the need for prior knowledge or innate abilities. The review explores different interpretations of POS, including when data are simply unavailable ("the data just aren't there"), noisy, or misleading, and discusses how to demonstrate its occurrence through formal learnability approaches and ideal/constrained learner models. Crucially, the text examines the resulting debate between linguistic nativists, who believe the required innate knowledge is language-specific (Universal Grammar), and non-linguistic nativists (often called empiricists), who argue the innate abilities are domain-general, illustrating these concepts with case studies in syntax, lexical semantics, and phonology.

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