'learning paths' instead of parameters

[Aliyah MORGENSTERN]

Dear Fritz,

Maybe a few main books/manuals could be helpful to you such as Child Language Acquisition by Ben Ambridge and Elena Lieven, Cambridge University Press (where you'll also find a relevant bibliography and contrasting theoretical approaches) or some of Elena Lieven/Tomasello group's papers to begin with even though you will also find answers in dozens of previous studies.
And maybe just looking into actual child data and their adult interlocutors yourself on CHILDES might be useful, concentrating if you are interested in that topic, on the order of elements in NPs. If you choose the five most frequent nouns and the five less frequent ones (and five in the middle of the list as well)  for example, you might not find the same "learning paths".  But I'm sure someone on the list has already done such a study. And frequency is not the only factor to be taken into account of course. The French children we have studied don't follow the same paths according to the noun they are using. But their productions resemble adults' almost too fast and we would need much denser data to figure out what is really going on.

One of the fascinating aspects of our field is that acquisition is not that 'orderly', it actually looks wonderfully messy, even though of course we do find enough regularities to satisfy our need for order and logic and because language and languages are constructed out of common conventionalization processes linked to their social and cognitive aspects. But each child though he/she is as human as the next and born with the same organs and senses, lives through different kinds of experiences, in different cultures, is surrounded by various types of input, is treated differently and has different types of interests. All these factors influence their "learning paths" in dozens of ways and even interfere with each other.
Of course you already know that, sorry for my spontaneous reaction to your emaiL...

Best,
Aliyah

Le 25 sept. 2014 à 19:24, Frederick Newmeyer a écrit :

> Dear colleagues,
> 
> I hope that you don't mind a question from an outsider who has a very small mastery of the acquisition literature.
> 
> There is a recently-developed approach to formal syntax that has abandoned the idea of innate parameters directing the course of acquisition. In their place, it posits universal 'learning paths', determined by 'general cognitive optimization strategies', and whose operation to a considerable degree mimics the work once done by parameter hierarchies. In a nutshell, it posits that for any structural (or constructional?) domain, the child makes the most general hypothesis first, and then gradually over time zeros in on the adult grammar.
> 
> Let me give a concrete example. Let's say that a language is consistently head-final except in NP, where the noun precedes its complements. However, there is a definable class of nouns in this language do follow their complements. And a few nouns in this language behave idiosyncratically in terms of the positioning of their specifiers and complements (much like the English word 'enough', which is one of the few degree modifiers that follows the adjective). 
> 
> According to the theory I am describing, the child will go through the following stages of acquisition:
> 1. First s/he will assume that ALL phrases are head-final, even noun phrases.
> 2. Next s/he will assume that ALL NPs are head-initial
> 3. Next s/he will learn the class of exceptions to 2.
> 4. Finally, s/he will learn the purely idiosyncratic exceptions.
> 
> Is there any evidence that acquisition actually proceeds in this 'orderly' manner? I remember from years ago some inconclusive discussion about the 'subset principle', but I would very very interested to hear what you have to say about recent work that bears on the scenario that I have described above.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> --fritz
> 
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