Item-based constructions and the logical problem

  • Authors:
  • Brian MacWhinney

  • Affiliations:
  • Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

  • Venue:
  • PMHLA '05 Proceedings of the Workshop on Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition
  • Year:
  • 2005

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

The logical problem of language is grounded on arguments from poverty of positive evidence and arguments from poverty of negative evidence. Careful analysis of child language corpora shows that, if one assumes that children learn through item-based constructions, there is an abundance of positive evidence. Arguments regarding the poverty of negative evidence can also be addressed by the mechanism of conservative item-based learning. When conservativism is abandoned, children can rely on competition, cue construction, monitoring and probabilistic identification to derive information from positive data to recover from overgeneralization.