How Far Can Indirect Evidence Take Us? Anaphoric One Revisited

Induction problems, indirect positive evidence, and Universal Grammar: Anaphoric one revisited

One motivation for Universal Grammar (UG) comes from the existence of induction problems in language acquisition, and their solutions. Previous induction problem characterizations have typically not recognized that INDIRECT POSITIVE evidence may be both available and useful, in addition to other types of evidence. As a case study, we investigate whether a probabilistic learner utilizing indirec...

Indirect Evidence and the Poverty of the Stimulus: The Case of Anaphoric One

It is widely held that children's linguistic input underdetermines the correct grammar, and that language learning must therefore be guided by innate linguistic constraints. Here, we show that a Bayesian model can learn a standard poverty-of-stimulus example, anaphoric one, from realistic input by relying on indirect evidence, without a linguistic constraint assumed to be necessary. Our demonst...

The role of indirect positive evidence in syntactic acquisition: A look at anaphoric one

Language learners are often faced with a scenario where the data allow multiple generalizations, even though only one is actually correct. One promising solution to this problem is that children are equipped with helpful learning strategies that guide the types of generalizations made from the data. Two successful approaches in recent work for identifying these strategies have involved (i) expa...

The role of indirect positive evidence in syntactic acquisition: A look at anaphoric one SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

One Among Many: Anaphoric One and Its Relationship With Numeral One.

One anaphora (e.g., this is a good one) has been used as a key diagnostic in syntactic analyses of the English noun phrase, and "one-replacement" has also figured prominently in debates about the learnability of language. However, much of this work has been based on faulty premises, as a few perceptive researchers, including Ray Jackendoff, have made clear. Abandoning the view of anaphoric one ...