Unfaithful conduct : A competence - based explanation of asymmetries between production and comprehension

Children’s production skills in their native language do not always develop in tandem with their comprehension skills. In some cases, children’s comprehension is adult-like, while their production is still poor. In other cases, the situation is the other way around and children’s production is adult-like, while their comprehension is still poor. Optimality Theory is able to provide a competence-based explanation for these asynchronies in children’s language development because optimization is direction-sensitive. As a result, an OT grammar may yield a different mapping between form and meaning in production than in comprehension. This paper explores which configurations of constraints predict such asymmetries between production and comprehension. It is argued that asymmetries arise from various configurations of constraints and are resolved by the OT learning mechanisms of constraint reranking and bidirectional optimization.