A fundamental goal of linguistic theory is to explain how natural languages are acquired. This paper describes some recent findings on how learners acquire syntactic knowledge for which there is little, if any, decisive evidence from the environment. The first section presents several general observations about language acquisition that linguistic theory has tried to explain and discusses the thesis that certain linguistic properties are innate because they appear universally and in the absence of corresponding experience. A third diagnostic for (...) innateness, early emergence, is the focus of the second section of the paper, in which linguistic theory is tested against recent experimental evidence on children's acquisition of syntax. (shrink)

It has been argued that the primary acquisition of genericity in early child speech poses a problem for standard quantificational approaches to generics and instead motivates the claim that generics give voice to an innate, default mode of generalising. This article argues that analogous puzzles involving the acquisition of A‐quantifiers undermine the empirical support for a purely cognition‐based approach to generics. Instead, these acquisition puzzles should be solved by generalising the core insight of the cognitive defaults theory (...) to these expressions, reconciling formal semantic approaches with the role that cognitive development plays on lexical competence. (shrink)

Recent research suggests that language evolution is a process of cultural change, in which linguistic structures are shaped through repeated cycles of learning and use by domain-general mechanisms. This paper draws out the implications of this viewpoint for understanding the problem of language acquisition, which is cast in a new, and much more tractable, form. In essence, the child faces a problem of induction, where the objective is to coordinate with others (C-induction), rather than to model the structure of (...) the natural world (N-induction). We argue that, of the two, C-induction is dramatically easier. More broadly, we argue that understanding the acquisition of any cultural form, whether linguistic or otherwise, during development, requires considering the corresponding question of how that cultural form arose through processes of cultural evolution. This perspective helps resolve the “logical” problem of language acquisition and has far-reaching implications for evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

ABSTRACTA paper in two parts, the first is a critique of the commonly held view among both cognitivist and non-cognitivist sport philosophers that conscious mental representation of knowledge that is a necessary condition for skill acquisition. The second is a defense of a necessary causal condition for skill acquisition, a necessary causal condition that is mimetic, physically embodied, and socially embedded. To make my case I rely throughout on a common thought experiment in and beyond the philosophy of (...) sport literature, the seminal work of Kuhn and Quine counter the representational theory of knowledge, and recent argument in the philosophy of sport related to neurophysiology, cognition, and intentionality. Ultimately I conclude that the failure of a necessary representational condition and its replacement by a necessary casual condition in skill acquisition jeopardizes much of what has been said in the philosophy of sport about not just skill acquisition but the more popular topic of high-level skill. It does, because it challenges the assumption that there is some necessary baseline knowledge that which, according to cognitivists, is brought forward in some way into highly skillful performance or, according to non-cognitivists, is somehow left behind or subsumed into a background in highly skillful performance. (shrink)

Acquisitions : an overview -- Assemblages of access -- Assemblages of discovery -- Assemblages of feedback -- The acquisitions assemblage : putting it all together.

L’acquisition des pronoms chez les enfants à développement langagier typique est complexe car elle combine de nombreux paramètres, notamment une capacité d’abstraction. Dans une première partie, ces paramètres sont décrits en rapport avec les trajectoires d’apprentissage mises en évidence par la littérature. La seconde partie est consacrée aux difficultés que pose l’acquisition des pronoms chez des enfants à développement langagier atypique, pour des raisons de troubles spécifiques du langage ou de surdité profonde.

Debating on Second Language Acquisition is not merely in terms of concept but also the real phenomena which postulate each research result. It needs more investigation on SLA due to the various realities on how children and adults acquire and learn any language. This research aims to describe how children and adults acquire and learn their first and second language. Participants consisted of children and adults whose ages determined by the researcher based on the purposive sampling technique. They were (...) all six persons and chosen based on certain characteristics. Content analysis technique was applied in order to analyze all data gained. The result showed that since human alive inside mother’s womb especially at up to the age of three months, a fetus has tried to acquire sounds subconsciously. Language proficiency is really determined by three factors of Phased Process Approach namely Subconscious Acquisition, Conscious Acquisition, and Learning. The ideal time for learning something is begun from the age of 2 or 3 years old, by the fact that children have had the ability to bear a meaning on any input that they catch. The learning process has been begun within the process of acquisition. Based on the findings, it is clear that the children acquire the language step by step based on the development of the brain. Children acquire language is just the same as adult in acquiring the language although there will be some constraints faced by adult concern with the first language because adult has had the strong basis of the first language just than children. (shrink)

The five-stage skill-acquisition model developed by Stuart Dreyfus is revisited as an integral part of culture acquisition. This examination sheds light on the role intuitive knowledge plays during the 4th and 5th stages. When modern technology becomes universal and detaches itself from culture, this intuitive knowledge changes. This accounts for the loss of technologies that were socially appropriate and environmentally sustainable.

In light of the dramatic growth of Chinese learners worldwide and a need for cross-linguistic research on Chinese literacy development, this study drew upon theories of visual complexity effect (Su & Samuels, 2010) and dual-coding processing (Sadoski & Paivio, 2013) and investigated a) the effects of character properties (i.e., visual complexity and radical presence) on character acquisition and b) the relationship between individual learner differences in radical awareness and character acquisition. Participants included adolescent English-speaking beginning learners of Chinese (...) in the U.S. Following Kuo et al. (2014), a novel character acquisition task was used to investigate the process of acquiring the meaning of new characters. Results showed that a) characters with radicals and with less visual complexity were easier to acquire than characters without radicals and with greater visual complexity; and b) individual differences in radical awareness were associated with the acquisition of all types of characters, but the association was more pronounced with the acquisition of characters with radicals. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings were discussed. (shrink)

This study examined patterns of auxiliary provision and omission for the auxiliaries BE and HAVE in a longitudinal data set from 11 children between the ages of two and three years. Four possible explanations for auxiliary omission—a lack of lexical knowledge, performance limitations in production, the Optional Infinitive hypothesis, and patterns of auxiliary use in the input—were examined. The data suggest that although none of these accounts provides a full explanation for the pattern of auxiliary use and nonuse observed in (...) children's early speech, integrating input-based and lexical learning-based accounts of early language acquisition within a constructivist approach appears to provide a possible framework in which to understand the patterns of auxiliary use found in the children's speech. The implications of these findings for models of children's early language acquisition are discussed. (shrink)

We are reviewing and summarizing evidence for the processes of acquisition of information outside of conscious awareness (processing information about covariations, nonconscious indirect and interactive inferences, self-perpetuation of procedural knowledge). A considerable amount of data indicates that as compared to consciously controlled cognition, the nonconscious information-acquisition processes are not only much faster but also structurally more sophisticated in the sense that they are capable of efficient processing of multidimensional and interactive relations between variables. Those mechanisms of nonconscious (...) class='Hi'>acquisition of information provide a major channel for the development of procedural knowledge which is indispensable for such important aspects of cognitive functioning as encoding and interpretation of stimuli and the triggering emotional reactions. (shrink)

An experiment explored the acquisition of conscious and unconscious knowledge of semantic prosody in a second language under incidental and intentional learning conditions. Semantic prosody is the conotational coloring of the semantics of a word, largely uncaptured by dictionary definitions. Contrary to some claims in the literature, we revealed that both conscious and unconscious knowledge were involved in the acquisition of semantic prosody. Intentional learning resulted in similar unconscious but more conscious knowledge than incidental learning. The results are (...) discussed in terms of second language learning and the nature of unconscious knowledge. (shrink)

Deliberate contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA) is a reader’s ability to figure out a (not the) meaning for an unknown word from its “context”, without external sources of help such as dictionaries or people. The appropriate context for such CVA is the “belief-revised integration” of the reader’s prior knowledge with the reader’s “internalization” of the text. We discuss unwarranted assumptions behind some classic objections to CVA, and present and defend a computational theory of CVA that we have adapted to a (...) new classroom curriculum designed to help students use CVA to improve their reading comprehension. (shrink)

For more than 60 years, Chomsky has been an intellectual Colossus bestriding the worlds of language, philosophy, and the cognitive sciences, and focusing attention on the whole field and emphasizing the crucial importance of domains overlooked by the mainstream. One such area is the study of first‐language acquisition. This chapter considers “atypical acquisition” to cover two conceptually related situations. First, it covers a variety of cases where there is an obvious “poverty of the stimulus” in that children either (...) receive or perceive no linguistic input at the essential early stages referred to as critical periods. Second, it covers where there is rather the opposite situation. The chapter presents atypicality in language acquisition that stems from the learner's atypical neurological profile rather than environmental or input properties. It focuses on Developmental Language Disorder, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and the case of the polyglot‐savant Christopher to exemplify atypical acquisition. (shrink)

Many problems can be solved in two ways: either by adapting an existing solution, or by exchanging it for a new one. To investigate under what conditions people consider new solutions, we traced their information acquisition processes in a simulated mechanical engineering task. Within a multi-step optimisation procedure, participants could either adapt the properties of a currently used machine component, or exchange this component for a new one. They had the opportunity to check whether the solutions met a set (...) of requirements, which was varied systematically. We investigated whether participants would consistently check both solutions, or whether they would satisfice, ignoring the new solution as long as the current one was good enough. The results clearly refuted consistent checking, but only partly confirmed satisficing. On the one hand, participants indeed checked the new solution least often when the current one was applicable without problems. On the other hand, in this case the new solution still was not fully ignored. However, the latter finding could be traced back to a few participants who diverged from our anticipated strategy of first checking the current solution, and directly went for the new one. The results suggest that in Adapt/Exchange decisions, people do not usually check both solutions in an unbiased manner, but rely on existing solutions as long as they are good enough. (shrink)

Suppose libertarians could prove that durable, unqualified private property rights could be created through 'original acquisition' of unowned resources in a state of nature. Such a proof would cast serious doubt on the legitimacy of the modern state. It could also render the approach to property rights that I favour irrelevant. I argue here that none of the familiar Lockean-libertarian arguments for a strong natural right to acquisition succeed, and that any successful argument for grounding a right to (...) acquire would have to use my favoured approach to property rights - the 'vector-sum' approach. I conclude with some doubts about original acquisition theory and natural property rights. (shrink)

Referring to entities is one of the key functions of language; learning to understand and use the relevant referential expressions is one of children’s major linguistic achievements. The 13 chapters of this volume bring together a wealth of information on the acquisition of referential processes in infants, pre-schoolers and school-age children drawing on data from more than 25 languages ranging from Italian to Inuktitut, and from Norwegian to Turkish. This book presents the state-of-the-art of corpus and experimental research on (...) the acquisition of reference. The breadth of aspects of referential acquisition will make the volume appealing to a wide audience of researchers, including linguists and psycholinguists working on phonological, morpho-syntactic, and discourse-pragmatic aspects of language development. The cross-linguistic perspective adopted by several of the contributors will be of particular interest to researchers investigating the relevance of typological differences. The state-of-the-art approach makes the research accessible to specialist and non-specialist researchers alike, and will provide an invaluable resource for graduate-level courses. (shrink)

Learning English is still challenging, especially for Papua and non-Papua undergraduate students in several conflict areas of Southwest Papua. Few studies have been conducted on the most effective method to teach English as a conflict language. This research investigates undergraduate students' perceptions when they learn English vocabulary using Kagan's fan-n-pick structure implemented in primary school teacher education study programs. The use of questionnaires and interviews to explore 26 undergraduate students’ perceptions of Kagan’s fan-n-pick structure in learning English vocabulary. This study (...) is a content analysis employing descriptive qualitative. The content analysis for this study examines the range of types and frequency of students' perceptions. It is concerned with analyzing and presenting the data in percentages of questionnaires and content interviews. The findings of this study highlight the benefits of the method that relate to the five principles of the cooperative learning approach. Kagan’s Fan-N-Pick affected the student’s ability to think, communicate, collaborate, and build teams in English learning, especially in terms of vocabulary acquisition. It improves the receptive and productive vocabulary skills of undergraduate students. This helps students solve problems both individually and in groups. It fosters engagement, participation, social interaction, flexibility, and adaptability while being simple and accessible to areas with humanitarian crises. It concludes that the FNP structure can be used to prepare pre-service teachers at the primary education level, helping them develop skills in real situations, and fostering respect for diversity, which they will pass on to their future students by incorporating basic and flexible strategies into conflict-ridden environments. (shrink)

In Pitjantjatjara, a central Australian Indigenous language, speakers typically describe sequences of actions using clause chaining constructions. While similar constructions are common among the world’s languages, very little is known about how children acquire them. A notable exception are the converb constructions of Turkish, which have been relatively well-studied. The present paper examines the acquisition of Pitjantjatara clause chaining constructions and compares this with the acquisition of Turkish converb constructions. Data is drawn from a naturalistic corpus recorded between (...) 2016 and 2019. The corpus contains over 4000 utterances from 23 children aged between 10 months and 10 years, five of whom are recorded at multiple ages. The corpus also includes approximately 1600 utterances from 21 adults, aged between 16 and 70. Results show that the acquisition of Pitjantjatjara clause chains consists of three stages. Stage 1 features juxtaposition of finite verb forms. In Stage 2, children make regular use of clause chain morphology, but primarily for modification purposes. In Stage 3, clause chains are the preferred strategy for sequential actions as well as modification purposes. The initial use of verb juxtaposition followed by increasing use of dedicated morphology is consistent with findings for Turkish converb acquisition, with speakers of both languages utilizing dedicated forms from around 2;6 onwards. A notable difference between the acquisition of Pitjantjatjara clause chains and Turkish converbs is in the order of acquisition of semantic functions. In Turkish, children acquire temporal functions, such as sequential actions, before modifying functions, such as manner specification. In Pitjantjatjara, the order is reversed, with children first using clause chaining constructions for modification and simultaneous aspects of events before utilizing them to combine sequential actions. This raises questions regarding the distribution and relative timing of event combination and modification strategies. (shrink)

Using connectionist modeling, we address fundamental questions concerning the acquisition process of musical tonal schema of listeners. Compared to models of previous studies, our connectionist model (LeNTS) was better equipped to fulfill three basic requirements. Specifically, LeNTS was equipped with a learning mechanism, bound by culture-general properties, and trained by sufficient melody materials. When exposed to Western music, LeNTS acquired musical ‘scale’ sensitivity early and ‘harmony’ sensitivity later. The order of acquisition of scale and harmony sensitivities shown by (...) LeNTS was consistent with the culture-specific acquisition order shown by musically westernized children. The implications of these results for the acquisition process of a tonal schema of listeners are as follows: (a) the acquisition process may entail small and incremental changes, rather than large and stage-like changes, in corresponding neural circuits; (b) the speed of schema acquisition may mainly depend on musical experiences rather than maturation; and (c) the learning principles of schema acquisition may be culturally invariant while the acquired tonal schemas are varied with exposed culture-specific music. (shrink)

Die Anforderungen an das ethisch-professionelle Handeln Pflegender und somit auch die Forderungen an die professionelle Ethikkompetenz Pflegender im praktischen Berufsfeld wandeln sich sowohl qualitativ als auch quantitativ. Dies wird auch in den veränderten normativen Rahmungen der Pflegebildung deutlich. Der Lernort Praxis als ein zentraler Ort pflegebezogener (Aus‑)Bildungsprozesse rückt somit nochmals stärker in den Fokus der Ethikkompetenzentwicklung professionell Pflegender. Der Beitrag konturiert zentrale Anforderungen und veränderte Bezüglichkeiten für die Ethikbildung im beruflichen Handlungsfeld professioneller Pflege und formuliert davon ausgehend zentrale Prämissen an (...) organisationsethische Rahmenbedingungen mit dem Ziel, eine ethisch fundierte professionelle pflegerische Handlungspraxis zu unterstützen. (shrink)

Children have difficulty comprehending novel verbs in the double object dative as compared to the prepositional dative. We explored this pattern with 3 and 4 year olds. In Experiment 1, we replicated the documented difficulty with the double object frame, even though we provided more contextual support. In Experiment 2, we tested a novel hypothesis that children would comprehend novel verbs in, and generalize them to, the double object frame if they were first familiarized to the verbs in the prepositional (...) frame. They did, suggesting that part of their difficulty with the double object frame is due to uncertainty about a new verb's semantic/syntactic properties, information that the easy-to-comprehend prepositional frame provides. The benefits of training were short-lived, however; children again struggled after a 2-h delay. The results are discussed in the context of mechanisms underlying verb acquisition. (shrink)

We use the comparative method of language acquisition research to investigate children’s expression of directional expressions in two Eastern Mayan languages – K’iche’ and Mam. Both languages add clitics derived from verbs such as ‘go’ and ‘stay’ to their verb complex to express the direction an agent takes in the course of accomplishing an event. Historic changes to the prosodic structure of the verb complex in both languages explain why the directional clitics are predominately postverbal in K’iche’, while they (...) occur in preverbal and postverbal positions in Mam. Prosody explains why K’iche’ children initially produce clitics postverbally, while Mam children produce clitics both preverbally and postverbally. Prosody also explains why the children acquiring both languages produce morphemes in the verb complex that are relatively infrequent but prosodically prominent, while omitting obligatory morphemes that are prosodically weak. (shrink)

This book describes the repertoire and uses of referring expressions by French-speaking children and their interlocutors in naturally occurring dialogues at home and at school, in a wide-range of communicative situations and activities. Through the lens of an interactionist and dialogical perspective, it highlights the interaction between the formal aspects of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes, the discourse-pragmatic dimension, and socio-discursive, interactional and dialogical factors. Drawing on this multidimensional theoretical and methodological framework, the first part of the book deals (...) with the relation between reference and grammar, while the second part is devoted to the role of the communicative experience. Progressively, a set of arguments is brought out in favor of a dialogical and interactionist account of children's referential development. This theoretical stance is further discussed in relation to other approaches of reference acquisition. Thus, this volume provides researchers and students with new perspectives and methods for the study of referring expressions in children. (shrink)

The acquisition of professional knowledge is a core issue in the formation of auditor industry expertise; however, previous literature has neglected the time required for auditors to acquire professional knowledge. We examine the audit quality and fees of audit firms in different stages of an auditor acquiring professional knowledge and find that, in the initial stage of the process of knowledge acquisition, audit quality and audit fees decrease. However, in the long run, knowledge learning has a more obvious (...) effect on the improvement of audit quality and audit fees. Specifically, knowledge learning has a positive effect on the development of audit firms. (shrink)

A recent hypothesis in empirical brain research on language is that the fundamental difference between animal and human communication systems is captured by the distinction between finite-state and more complex phrase-structure grammars, such as context-free and context-sensitive grammars. However, the relevance of this distinction for the study of language as a neurobiological system has been questioned and it has been suggested that a more relevant and partly analogous distinction is that between non-adjacent and adjacent dependencies. Online memory resources are central (...) to the processing of non-adjacent dependencies as information has to be maintained across intervening material. One proposal is that an external memory device in the form of a limited push-down stack is used to process non-adjacent dependencies. We tested this hypothesis in an artificial grammar learning paradigm where subjects acquired non-adjacent dependencies implicitly. Generally, we found no qualitative differences between the acquisition of non-adjacent dependencies and adjacent dependencies. This suggests that although the acquisition of non-adjacent dependencies requires more exposure to the acquisition material, it utilizes the same mechanisms used for acquiring adjacent dependencies. We challenge the push-down stack model further by testing its processing predictions for nested and crossed multiple non-adjacent dependencies. The push-down stack model is partly supported by the results, and we suggest that stack-like properties are some among many natural properties characterizing the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms that implement the online memory resources used in language and structured sequence processing. (shrink)

Acquisition of a nose-poke operant response was investigated in rats. The baseline level of this response was high and acquisition with food reinforcement occurred rapidly, particularly when compared with a leverpress operant response. A variety of control procedures clearly indicated that this response was acquired due to the contingency between nose pokes and food reinforcement.The response was also sensitive to manipulations of delay of reinforcement and food-deprivation level. Acquisition was slowed with longer delays of reinforcement and with (...) decreases in deprivation level. Therefore, the nose-poke response appears to be particularly useful for the study of the acquisition of operant responses. (shrink)

My aim in this essay is to explore the nature and force of “original-acquisition” justifications of private property. By “original-acquisition” justifications, I mean those arguments which purport to establish or importantly contribute to the moral defense of private property by: offering a moral/historical account of how legitimate private property rights for persons first arose ; offering a hypothetical or conjectural account of how justified private property could arise from a propertyless condition; or simply defending an account of how (...) an individual can make private property in some previously unowned thing . The “original acquisition” to which such justifications centrally refer, then, may be either the first instance of legitimate private property in human history , or only the first legitimate acquisition of some particular thing . But in either case, the justification will involve or entail the defense of one or more moral principles specifying how unowned things can become privately owned — that is, the defense of the kind of principles Robert Nozick has called “principles of justice in acquisition.”. (shrink)

This presentation discusses a notion encountered across disciplines, and in different facets of human activity: autonomous activity. We engage it in an interdisciplinary way. We start by considering the reactions and behaviors of biological entities to biotechnological intervention. An attempt is made to characterize the degree of freedom of embryos & clones, which show openness to different outcomes when the epigenetic developmental landscape is factored in. We then consider the claim made in programming and artificial intelligence that automata could show (...) self-directed behavior as to the determination of their step-wise decisions on courses of action. This question remains largely open and calls for some important qualifications. We try to make sense of the presence of claims of freedom in agency, first in common sense, then by ascribing developmental plasticity in biology and biotechnology, and in the mapping of programmed systems in the presence of environmental cues and self-referenced circuits as well as environmental coupling. This is the occasion to recall attempts at working out a logical and methodological approach to the openness of concepts that are still to be found, and assess whether they can operate the structuring intelligibility of a yet undeveloped or underdeveloped field of study, where a “bisociation" and a unification of knowledge might be possible. (shrink)

Contemporary Kantians suggest that the original acquisition of property is problematic for Kant’s theory of private law. Kant requires that private law obligations be consistent with the equal freedom of everyone. However, a rule of original acquisition seems to favor the acquirer’s freedom over others’: the acquirer originally obtains property in an unowned object simply by taking control of it, and thus seems to impose obligations on everyone else through her own “unilateral” action or choice. This article first (...) addresses proposed Kantian solutions to the supposed “unilateralism” problem, which involve the creation of a “civil condition” of public legal institutions to determine property rights. Such solutions make property rights a matter of distributive justice rather than corrective justice. Moreover, they cannot actually solve the unilateralism problem. But in any event, the supposed “unilateralism” problem is in fact no problem at all for Kant. This is because one person’s original acquisition does not limit others’ “freedom” in the Kantian sense of that term. In this respect Kant’s account of property is equivalent to Hegel’s, which contemporary Kantians have criticized for denying any problem of unilateralism. And both Kant and Hegel’s accounts are fully consistent with a theory that explains property as a matter of corrective, rather than distributive, justice. (shrink)

To what extent, if any, does Universal Grammar (UG) constrain second language (L2) acquisition? This is not only an empirical question, but one which is currently investigable. In this context, L2 acquisition is emerging as an important new domain of psycholinguistic research. Three logical possibilities have been articulated regarding the role of UG in L2 acquisition: The first is the hypothesis that claims that no aspect of UG is available to the L2 learner. The second is the (...) hypothesis that claims that only LI instantiated principles and LI instantiated parameter-values of UG are available to the learner. The third, called the hypothesis, asserts that UG in its entirety constrains L2 acquisition. (shrink)

The acquisition of virtue can be conceptualized as a self-regulatory process in which deliberate practice results in increasingly higher levels of skillfulness in leading a virtuous life. This conceptualization resonates with philosophical virtue theories as much as it converges with psychological models about skill development, expertise, goal motivation, and self-regulation. Yet, the conceptualization of virtue as skill acquisition poses the crucial question of motivation: What motivates individuals to self-improvement over time so that they can learn from past experience, (...) correct mistakes, and expand their ethical knowledge to new and unfamiliar circumstances? In this paper, it is argued that the motivation to increase one’s level of skillfulness in leading a virtuous life is supported by a specific identity goal, namely the goal to be a moral person. However, this moral identity goal needs to carry specific goal characteristics in order to effectively provide this motivation. It needs to be sufficiently abstract, internally motivated and promotion- rather than prevention-oriented. Research in developmental psychology suggests that the moral identity of children is rather concrete, externally motivated, and prevention-oriented. With development, higher levels of abstraction, internal motivation, and promotion-orientation gain importance providing an important motivational basis for a self-regulated process of virtue acquisition. (shrink)

An analysis of student learning with the LISP tutor indicates that while LISP is complex, learning it is simple. The key to factoring out the complexity of LISP is to monitor the learning of the 500 productions in the LISP tutor which describe the programming skill. The learning of these productions follows the power‐law learning curve typical of skill acquisition. There is transfer from other programming experience to the extent that this programming experience involves the same productions. Subjects appear (...) to differ only on the general dimensions of how well they acquire the productions and how well they retain the productions. Instructional manipulations such as remediation, content of feedback, and timing of feedback are effective to the extent they give students more practice programming, and explain to students why correct solutions work. (shrink)

What makes a word easy to learn? Early‐learned words are frequent and tend to name concrete referents. But words typically do not occur in isolation. Some words are predictable from their contexts; others are less so. Here, we investigate whether predictability relates to when children start producing different words (age of acquisition; AoA). We operationalized predictability in terms of a word's surprisal in child‐directed speech, computed using n‐gram and long‐short‐term‐memory (LSTM) language models. Predictability derived from LSTMs was generally a (...) better predictor than predictability derived from n‐gram models. Across five languages, average surprisal was positively correlated with the AoA of predicates and function words but not nouns. Controlling for concreteness and word frequency, more predictable predicates and function words were learned earlier. Differences in predictability between languages were associated with cross‐linguistic differences in AoA: the same word (when it was a predicate) was produced earlier in languages where the word was more predictable. (shrink)

This paper aims to exemplify the language acquisition model by tracing back to the Socratic model of language learning procedure that sets down inborn knowledge, a kind of implicit knowledge that becomes explicit in our language. Jotting down the claims in Meno, Plato triggers a representationalist outline basing on the deductive reasoning, where the conclusion follows from the premises (inborn knowledge) rather than experience. This revolution comes from the pen of Noam Chomsky, who amends the empiricist position on the (...) creativity of language by pinning down it with the innateness hypothesis. However, Chomsky never rejects the external world or the linguistic stipulation that relies on the objective reality. Wittgenstein’s model of language acquisition upholds a liaison centric appeal that stands between experience (use theory of meaning) and mentalism (mind based inner experiences). Wittgenstein’s Tractatus never demarcates the definite mental processes that entangle with the method of understanding and meaning. Wittgenstein’s ‘language game’ takes care of the model of language acquisition in a paradigmatic way. The way portrait language as the form of life and the process of language acquisition is nothing but a language game that relies on the activity of men. (shrink)

Ecological developmental biology considers the phenotype as actively produced through an environmentally informed process of individual development, rather than predetermined by the genotype. Accordingly, the genotype is viewed as one among many interactants that contribute formative elements; it is understood to do so no differently from the way other organism-internal and environmental resources do. Although the EcoDevo approach is evidently particularly apt to inform approaches to human development, which mostly takes shape in rich cultural environments, it is remarkable that, at (...) least within some highly influential circles of the linguistic sciences, the study of many distinctive human cognitive traits including language remains strongly anchored to a preformationist stance. This article brings an EcoDevo approach to the biologically focused study of language to argue that an aspect of language design commonly assumed to be “blueprinted,” namely, the lexicon-syntax interface, may instead be explained as a plastic effect of ongoing developmental processes in the mind of the child, in which designated aspects of the environment fulfill a key constructive role. (shrink)

This chapter takes the familiar arguments for nativism to establish the interesting nativist thesis that “the initial state” of linguistic competence is sufficiently rich that humans can naturally learn only languages that conform to the rules specified by “Universal Grammar”. It rejects Fodor’s “only-theory-in-town” abduction for the very exciting “I-Representational Thesis”, the thesis that the UG-rules are represented in the initial state. It argues that this thesis lacks significant evidence and is implausible. The chapter also argues for some tentative proposals: (...) that the UG-rules are, largely if not entirely, innate structure rules of thought, a proposal resting on the Language-of-Thought Hypothesis ; that if LOTH is false, then the UG-rules are not, in a robust way, innate in a speaker; and that there is little or nothing to the language faculty. The chapter concludes the book-long argument that there is no significant evidence for the Representational Thesis and that it is implausible. (shrink)

In this study, we test a number of predictions concerning children's knowledge of the transitive Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) construction between two and three years on one child (Thomas) for whom we have densely collected data. The data show that the earliest SVO utterances reflect earlier use of those same verbs, and that verbs acquired before 2;7 show an earlier move towards adult-like levels of use in the SVO construction and in object argument complexity than later acquired verbs. There is not a (...) close relation with the input in the types of subject and object referents used, nor a close adherence to Preferred Argument Structure (PAS) before 2;7, but both early and late acquired verbs show a simultaneous move towards PAS patterns in selection of referent type at 2;9. The event semantics underpinning early transitive utterances do not straightforwardly fit prototype (high or inalienable) notions of transitivity, but rather may reflect sensitivity to animacy and intentionality in a way that mirrors the input. We conclude that children's knowledge of the transitive construction continues to undergo significant development between 2;0 and 3;0, reflecting the gradual abstraction and integration of the SVO and VO constructions, verb semantics, discourse pragmatics, and the interactions between these factors. These factors are considered in the context of a prototype for the transitive construction. (shrink)

Implicit learning is a core process for the acquisition of a complex, rule‐based environment from mere interaction, such as motor action, skill acquisition, or language. A body of evidence suggests that implicit knowledge governs music acquisition and perception in nonmusicians and musicians, and that both expert and nonexpert participants acquire complex melodic, harmonic, and other features from mere exposure. While current findings and computational modeling largely support the learning of chunks, some results indicate learning of more complex (...) structures. Despite the body of evidence, more research is required to support the cross‐cultural validity of implicit learning and to show that core and more complex music theoretical features are acquired implicitly. (shrink)