Language Learning From Positive Evidence, Reconsidered: A Simplicity-Based Approach

Language learning from positive evidence, reconsidered: A simplicity-based approach

Children learn their native language by exposure to their linguistic and communicative environment, but apparently without requiring that their mistakes be corrected. Such learning from "positive evidence" has been viewed as raising "logical" problems for language acquisition. In particular, without correction, how is the child to recover from conjecturing an over-general grammar, which will be...

Simplicity-based approach to language learning 1 Running Head: Simplicity-based approach to language learning Language learning from positive evidence, reconsidered: A simplicity-based approach

Children appear to be able to learn their native language by exposure to their linguistic and communicative environment, but without requiring that their mistakes are corrected. Such learning from “positive evidence” has been viewed as raising “logical” problems for language acquisition: in particular, without correction, how is the child to recover from conjecturing an over-general grammar, wh...

‘Ideal learning’ of natural language: Positive results about learning from positive evidence

Gold’s [1967. Language identification in the limit. Information and Control, 16, 447–474] celebrated work on learning in the limit has been taken, by many cognitive scientists, to have powerful negative implications for the learnability of language from positive data (i.e., from mere exposure to linguistic input). This provides one, of several, lines of argument that language acquisition must d...

Language, Emotion and Metapragmatics: A Theory Based on Typological Evidence

Humans are equipped with some universal or language-specific abilities to recognize emotions. However, because of the different emotional contents in diverse languages and the relevant cultural differences, humans with different cultural backgrounds own different metapragmatical abilities to recognize and express emotions. A hypothesis concerning emotional effects about intonation and particle ...

Language Learning Strategies: A Strategy-Based Approach to L2 Learning.Strategic Competence, and Test Validation