The poverty of the stimulus argument systematically underestimates the richness of input available to language learners, including statistical regularities, caregiver speech patterns, and multimodal cues.

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Caregiver speech patterns(as used in child language development): The specific ways that parents, guardians, and other adults talk to children—often simpler, slower, and more repetitive than adult-to-adult conversation.
Multimodal cues(as used in cognitive science and communication studies): Information coming through multiple senses at once—like when a parent points at an object while saying its name, combining sight, sound, and gesture to help a child understand.
Statistical regularities(the basis of how grammar is supposedly learned): Patterns that appear when you look at lots of examples—like noticing that in English, certain words tend to follow other words in predictable ways.
Stimulus(as used in philosophy of perception): Something that triggers a reaction or response in a person, like light hitting your eye or a sound reaching your ear.
poverty of the stimulus argument(Originally formulated by Chomsky for language; extended by Mikhail and others to morality via the moral/linguistic analogy.): The argument that children develop linguistic (or moral) competence rapidly and at a young age despite receiving little explicit instruction, suggesting the relevant knowledge is innate rather than learned.

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