Linguistics | Sebastian J. Spicker

2026

1 article

21 Oct 2026 The Wealth of the Stimulus By the age of thirteen a child has heard something like sixty million words; Llama 3 was trained on the equivalent of roughly ten trillion words. The gap is often read as settling Chomsky’s poverty-of-the-stimulus argument, but that argument is about what a child-sized input contains, and the experiments that bear on it run at child scale, with mixed results. What children get and a corpus lacks is contingency: speech that answers them. In a language model the nearest thing is post-training on human feedback. In the published datasets of 2022–23 it is three to four orders of magnitude smaller than the same model’s pretraining, yet in absolute terms it is comparable to a childhood’s linguistic input, within about an order of magnitude either way, whether counted in words or in replies. The part of training that looks like upbringing is roughly the size of an upbringing. raising-machinesailanguage-acquisition