On virtual versus real spatio-temporal explanations of linguistic development

Language transfer: a useful or pernicious concept?

“…However, given the necessary close relationship between development and online performance, it becomes counterproductive not to consider the growth of grammatical representation as an outcome of processing in real time. This still means developing explanations concerning representation at a certain level of abstraction but down one notch from the level maintained when focusing purely on linguistic-theoretic aspects of developmental grammars (see related discussion in Marr, 1982: 25;Sharwood Smith, 2015. This means that abstract representational properties themselves may need some redescription to permit detailed accounts of their development over time and, suddenly, the notion of 'transferring' properties seems to require a new explanation as to how movement of 'R' elements between locations would be manifested in a time-sensitive 'P' system.…”