Full Description
First published in 1987. Three decades of intensive study of language development have led to an enormous accumulation of descriptive data. But there is still no over-arching theory of language development that can make orderly sense of this huge stockpile of observations. Grand structuralist theories such as those of Chomsky, Jakobson, and Piaget have kept researchers asking the right questions, but they seldom allow us to make detailed experimental predictions or to formulate detailed accounts. The papers collected in this volume attempt to address this gap between data and theory by formulating a series of mechanistic accounts of the acquisition of language.
Contents
PREFACE, PART I. THE PROBLEM OF OVERGENERALIZATION, 1. THE PRINCIPLE OF CONTRAST: A CONSTRAINT ON LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, 2. SIMPLICITY AND GENERALITY OF RULES IN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, 3. WHAT IS LEARNED IN ACQUIRING WORD CLASSES - A STEP TOWARD AN ACQUISITION THEORY, 4. A STUDY IN NOVEL WORD LEARNING: THE PRODUCTIVITY OF THE CAUSATIVE, 5. LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND MACHINE LEARNING, PART II. COMPETITION, 6. COMPETITION, VARIATION, AND LANGUAGE LEARNING, 7. LEARNING THE PAST TENSES OF ENGLISH VERBS: IMPLICIT RULES OR PARALLEL DISTRIBUTED PROCESSING, 8. THE COMPETITION MODEL, PART III. CONSTRAINTS ON THE FORM OF GRAMMAR, 9. THE ACQUISITION OF IMPLICIT ARGUMENTS AND THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THEORY, PROCESS, AND MECHANISM, 10. PARSABILITY AND LEARNABILITY, 11. REPRESENTATION, RULES AND OVERGENERALIZATION IN PHONOLOGY, 12. THE BOOTSTRAPPING PROBLEM IN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, COMMENTARY, AUTHOR INDEX, SUBJECT INDEX
