Delay in Principle B and the role of input Alright.

Ive been working through this idea since weve talked, which is a pretty strong indication that this whole thing is pretty weak. I thought I had found some interesting pattern in the acquisition literature weve read, but after working through it, most of the interesting bits are gone. I looked at some surface-level behavioral traits shared by these English monolinguals in the acquisition of target locality conditions and by minority bilingual Dutch children in their de/het determiner choice. In both cases learners are confronted with a pair of seemingly similar features, and in both cases one feature shows a significant delay. Locality Conditions Pair of seemingly similar features (only) One feature shows a delay Interference Principle P (not yet known) No morphological clues Dutch Determiners Interference ethnic Dutch input

What seemed exciting to me was the fact that both of these cases lack morphological clues AND the delayed feature in each case could be attributed to confounding variables. I thought our study today should help inform the case of ethnic Dutch bilinguals and can be seen in distant support for the role of input in second language acquisition. Im suggesting that what gives children problems with Principle B is, at its essence, a problem with inconsistent input. (By input here Im referring specifically to linguistic cues and performance feedback.) Because the choice of indexing in cases of co-reference appears open for these children (who lack the guidance of Principle P), and because correct assignment appears random (without morphological cues), these English acquirers are not able to identify the model for target grammar. Without Principle P to make pragmatic sense in of cases of co-reference, the rules of Principle B are hidden and performance feedback as to the grammaticality/ungrammaticality of a childs indexing assignment will not be particularly useful to them. I see this as connected with the issue of input in acquisition of het in ethnic minority Dutch bilinguals. In this case, ethnic Dutch input confounds and delays target grammar. Children here dont have access to a consistent model for a very different reason, but the same effect -- a delay in target acquisition -occurs. Because Principle A contains no confounding variation, acquirers are always presented with a clear model and therefore consistent performance feedback. As Chien and Wexler put it, Because anaphors will always be co-indexed with their antecedent, we do not have to worry about cases where they have a different index than antecedent(1990, p. 255). Couldnt the observed differences in the quality of acquisition of Principle A and Principle B (as well as the difference between de and het in the ethnic Dutch bilingual case) be fundamentally viewed as difference in input quality?