Language acquisition in the absence of experience

Crain, Stephen

doi:10.1017/s0140525x00071491

Cited by 426 publications

(210 citation statements)

References 103 publications

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“…These observations evoke the question: how do children learn which over-generalizations are ungrammatical without explicitly being told? Many language acquisition researchers have traditionally claimed that such learning is impossible without the aid of innate language-specific knowledge (Chomsky, 1975;Crain, 1991;Pinker, 1989).…”

Section: A Practical Framework For Quantifying Learnabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The probabilistic analysis of language acquisition: Theoretical, computational, and experimental analysis

2011

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Keywords:Child language acquisition Poverty of the stimulus No negative evidence Bayesian models Minimum description length Simplicity principle Natural language Probabilistic models Identification in the limit a b s t r a c t There is much debate over the degree to which language learning is governed by innate language-specific biases, or acquired through cognition-general principles. Here we examine the probabilistic language acquisition hypothesis on three levels: We outline a novel theoretical result showing that it is possible to learn the exact generative model underlying a wide class of languages, purely from observing samples of the language. We then describe a recently proposed practical framework, which quantifies natural language learnability, allowing specific learnability predictions to be made for the first time. In previous work, this framework was used to make learnability predictions for a wide variety of linguistic constructions, for which learnability has been much debated. Here, we present a new experiment which tests these learnability predictions. We find that our experimental results support the possibility that these linguistic constructions are acquired probabilistically from cognition-general principles.

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Section: A Practical Framework For Quantifying Learnabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The probabilistic analysis of language acquisition: Theoretical, computational, and experimental analysis

2011

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“…Similarly, in Penner's (1987) view, Brown and Hanlon ''concluded'' that punishment does not function ''to favor well-formed over illformed child utterances'' (p. 376). Many others (e.g., Crain, 1991;Gleitman & Gleitman, 1986) have also claimed that Brown and Hanlon reported finding an absence of negative evidence. Further, the supposed lack of negative evidence has played a critical role in arguments for a nativist account of language acquisition.…”

Section: Mythmentioning

confidence: 98%

Three Myths from the Language Acquisition Literature

Schoneberger

2010

Analysis Verbal Behav

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Three popular assertions have hindered the promotion of an empiricist approach to language acquisition: (a) that Brown and Hanlon (1970) claimed to offer data that parents do not reinforce their children's grammaticality; (b) that Brown and Hanlon also claimed to offer data that parents do not provide negative evidence (i.e., corrective feedback) for ungrammaticality; and (c) that Gold (1967) claimed to offer a formal proof showing that, without negative evidence, a child cannot acquire a language solely from environmental input. In this paper I offer introductory comments on the nature-nurture distinction (including interactionism, and the nativists' claim to have found a gene for language). Next I debunk the three aforementioned assertions by arguing that the authors (Brown & Hanlon; Gold) never made the claims attributed to them; review evidence on the role of reinforcement and corrective feedback in language acquisition; and offer some concluding comments.

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“…4.1; Chomsky 1957). Chomsky and collaborators also proposed that the complexity of the language-learning problem necessitates some guidance in the form of innate knowledge about the general rule structure of languages (Pinker 1979;; see also Crain 1991;Gold 1967). This poverty of stimulus argument has been partially refuted by research showing language statistics to be sufficient for developing some aspects of language (e.g., Baker & McCarthy 1981;Gallaway & Richards 1994;MacWhinney 1993).…”

Section: Attempts To Disambiguate Rules and Similarity In Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

Two types of thought: Evidence from aphasia

Davidoff

2005

Behav Brain Sci

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Abstract:The distinction between rules and similarity is central to our understanding of much of cognitive psychology. Two aspects of existing research have motivated the present work. First, in different cognitive psychology areas we typically see different conceptions of rules and similarity; for example, rules in language appear to be of a different kind compared to rules in categorization. Second, rules processes are typically modeled as separate from similarity ones; for example, in a learning experiment, rules and similarity influences would be described on the basis of separate models. In the present article, I assume that the rules versus similarity distinction can be understood in the same way in learning, reasoning, categorization, and language, and that a unified model for rules and similarity is appropriate. A rules process is considered to be a similarity one where only a single or a small subset of an object's properties are involved. Hence, rules and overall similarity operations are extremes in a single continuum of similarity operations. It is argued that this viewpoint allows adequate coverage of theory and empirical findings in learning, reasoning, categorization, and language, and also a reassessment of the objectives in research on rules versus similarity.Keywords: categorization; cognitive explanation; language; learning; reasoning; rules; similarity Emmanuel Pothos received his D.Phil. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oxford in 1998. Since then he has been a lecturer of psychology at the University of Wales at Bangor and at the University of Edinburgh; he is currently at the University of Crete. His research activity includes computational models in unsupervised categorization and statistical methods for disambiguating rules and similarity in learning. Additionally, he is looking at applications of learning models in the study of addictive behavior. A focal point of his work is the a priori comparability of theoretical accounts and explanatory concepts in cognitive psychology.partly because they uniquely have in common a particular set of properties or features, as research in basic level categorization and spontaneous classification shows (Pothos & Chater 2002;Rosch & Mervis 1975). I postulate that the object properties relevant in deciding how to categorize it amongst a number of candidate categories are the properties uniquely common to the instances of each category (cf. Aha & Goldstone 1992). For example, in order to decide whether my car keys are a member of the category 'things to take out of my house when it is on fire," I will have to consider only whether car keys match the uniquely common properties of the other members of that category ("credit cards," "my cat," "my university diploma") (Barsalou 1991). Note that the present proposal does not involve any commitment about the form of features or properties (cf. Marr 1982). We simply require that at some level it is possible to represent objects in terms of discrete entities (perceptual features, abstract proper...

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Language acquisition in the absence of experience

Cited by 426 publications

References 103 publications

The probabilistic analysis of language acquisition: Theoretical, computational, and experimental analysis

The probabilistic analysis of language acquisition: Theoretical, computational, and experimental analysis

Three Myths from the Language Acquisition Literature

Two types of thought: Evidence from aphasia

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