It would seem to be incomplete for any introduction to language acquisition to leave the ‘logical problem of language acquisition’ untouched – in fact, it would seem to be logical to just start the introduction with the logical problem. MacWhinney lays out a proposal here that attempts to dismantle the logical structure of the logical problem: there is no logical problem, if we consider careful...

Much of the debate on rule-based vs. connectionist models in language acquisition has focussed on the English past tense. This paper investigates a new area, the acquisition of verb subcategorization. Verbs differ in how they express their arguments or subcategorize for them. For example, “She gave him a book.” is good, but “She donated him a book.” sounds odd. The paper describes a connectioni...

Connectionist modeling experiments tested anomalous-face and baby-face overgeneralization hypotheses proposed to explain consensual trait impressions of faces. Activation of a neural network unit trained to respond to anomalous faces predicted impressions of normal adult faces varying in attractiveness as well as several elderly stereotypes. Activation of a neural network unit trained to respon...

The sunk cost effect is a maladaptive economic behavior that is manifested in a greater tendency to continue an endeavor once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made. The Concorde fallacy is another name for the sunk cost effect, except that the former term has been applied strictly to lower animals, whereas the latter has been applied solely to humans. The authors contend that th...

The ability to represent knowledge at the category level promotes the transfer of learning. How this ability integrates with basic forms of conditioned learning is unknown but could explain why conditioned fear is overgeneralized after aversive experiences. We examined the impact of stimulus typicality--an important determinant of category-based induction--on fear learning and generalization. T...

the present research aims to analyze the orthographic errors of german-speaking learners of persian at the elementary level. to do so, pieces of writing of 34 students were gathered via self-motivated method and examined based on the corpus of orthographic errors, using the frameworks proposed by keshavarz (1994) and ziahoseini (1999). 850 phonological, morphological, and orthographical errors ...

This paper investigates possible attrition/change in the gender system of Norwegian heritage language spoken in America. Based on data from 50 speakers in the Corpus of American Norwegian Speech (CANS), we show that the three-gender system is to some extent retained, although considerable overgeneralization of the masculine (the most frequent gender) is attested. This affects both feminine and ...

Linguists often assume that possible worlds and times are represented as pronouns in natural language (see Cresswell 1990, Percus 2000, Kusumoto 2005, Keshet 2008). This paper will construe such pronouns as world-time pairs, which will be referred to as situations, for simplicity. A predicate taking such a pair as an argument is evaluated in the world and the time specified by that situation, e...

We introduce the Lenient Multiagent Reinforcement Learning 2 (LMRL2) algorithm for independent-learner stochastic cooperative games. LMRL2 is designed to overcome a pathology called relative overgeneralization, and to do so while still performing well in games with stochastic transitions, stochastic rewards, and miscoordination. We discuss the existing literature, then compare LMRL2 against oth...

Four questions were addressed concerning perceptions of babyfaced individuals from infancy to older adulthood: (a) Do perceivers make reliable babyface judgments at each age; (b) does a babyface have the same effects on trait impressions at each age; (c) are the effects of a babyface independent of the effects of attractiveness; and (d) what facial maturity features are associated with babyface...