Discussion Learning antecedents for anaphoric one Nameera Akhtar a, * , Maureen Callanan a , Geoffrey K. Pullum b , Barbara C. Scholz c a Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA b Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA c Department of Philosophy, San Jose ´ State University, CA 95192, USA Received 1 October 2003; accepted 16 December 2003 Abstract Lidz et al. [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn’t have learned: Experimental evidence for syntactic structure at 18 months. Cognition, 89, B65 – B73.] claim experimental substantiation of an argument from the poverty of the stimulus, in the sense of Pullum and Scholz [Linguist. Rev. 19 (2002) 9]. They cite a specific feature of English— the assignment of appropriate antecedents for anaphoric one—that cannot possibly be learned from experience because the evidence needed is found only in utterances of a type too rare to be encountered. Their argument involves three empirical claims. In this note we dispute all three. q 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Language acquisition; Poverty of the stimulus; Linguistic input 1. Introduction Lidz, Waxman, and Freedman (2003; henceforth LWF) claim to have provided experimental support for an argument from poverty of the stimulus (APS) in the sense of Pullum and Scholz (2002). Their conclusions (p. B72) are bold: that certain syntactic knowledge “must derive from linguistic structure inherent in the learners themselves because…the input to which infants are exposed does not unambiguously support the linguistic representations that they create,” which suggests that “the learner’s innate linguistic structure guides language acquisition”; specifically, “infants at the earliest stages of syntactic production share with mature speakers of English” a certain piece of 0022-2860/$ - see front matter q 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2003.12.002 Cognition 93 (2004) 141–145 www.elsevier.com/locate/COGNIT * Corresponding author. E-mail address: nakhtar@ucsc.edu (N. Akhtar).