Negative Evidence on Negative Evidence

Previous work has shown that recasts may be contingent responses to children's early ungrammatically. On this basis, it has been claimed that recasts provide negative evidence, thereby offsetting the need for linguistic constraints in theories of acquisition. This study explores whether children exploit negative evidence putatively provided by recasts by examining whether parental recasts are associated with children's recovery from particular overgeneralization errors. Data from longitudinal investigations of 2 common syntactic errors reveal that recasts are related to children's subsequent grammaticality. However, contrary to what would be expected if recasts serve as corrections, the data show that recasts are negative leading indicators of grammaticality. Finally, correction and negative evidence axe examined and are shown to be nonequivalent. Therefore, corrections in whatever form they might exist can offset only a limited subset of proposed innate constraints on language acquisition.