 We saw (in section  3.1.1  and  3.1.2)  that Chomsky’s case for I-languages and against E-languages is heavily entwined with the poverty of stimulus assumption. This is used to defend the claim that human languages are little more than modifications of UG, and that the process of language acquisition and development is the process of such modifications. But studies have shown that social input, which children may pick up from and rely on, is rich both in content and structure (see Baldwin and Meyer 2007). In child-directed speech, adults use words in a way that makes it easier for children to identify the relevant information (see Brent and Siskind 2001; Akhtar, Dunham, and Dunham 1991), suggesting that social input is highly relevant to the development of semantic knowledge. Even if we limit the UG hypothesis to a claim about syntax there are empirical challenges. According to this more limited reading, the acquisition of syntactic process is “seen to rely most heavily on the operation of innate structural principles” (Baldwin and Meyer 2007: 95). Social input, on this view, plays a mere triggering role. Further studies have shown this hypothesis to be controversial. Alternative, socio-pragmatic, accounts have shown that children can learn syntax from adult language use (see Tomasello 2003, 2004). Children’s domain general abilities of statistical analysis, and pattern and intention recognition, are believed to assist the child in identifying and acquiring syntactic structure from the social linguistic input they receive (see Saffran, Aslin, and Newport 1996; Gentner, Holyoak, and Kokinov 2001). In general, the empirical evidence obtained by psycholinguistic studies strongly suggests that language acquisition and development is much more than just a process of UG modifications by means of mind/brain maturation.