'learning paths' instead of parameters

Sat Sep 27 04:04:00 UTC 2014

Fritz and John,

    The general idea that children follow learning pathways seems like a reasonable one.  However, the question is whether these pathways arise from preexisting universals or from the actual encounter of children with the specifics of language.  The example of a pathway that Fritz provided involved a gradual retreat from overgeneralization.  It had these four steps:
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.

A pathway of this type is not in accord with the Subset Principle, because that principle is fundamentally conservative, always favoring the most narrow grammar.  In the pathway Fritz describes, the child starts out with a huge generalization and then has to retreat, possibly relying on negative evidence.  

The idea that the child is fundamentally conservative crops up in many accounts.  For example, in my "Mechanisms of Language Acquisition" book from 1987, Fodor and Crain argued for conservatism in the form of the Subset Principle.  I argued for it in terms of my theory of item-based learning, and Berwick assumed it in his learning on error analysis.  The literature is full of evidence for conservatism from older work by Maratsos and Kuczaj to newer work by Lieven, Rowland, Ambridge, and colleagues.  In the area of lexical overgeneralization, there is similarly strong evidence for conservatism.

Of course, children are not always conservative.  Often they are missing forms and have to resort to overextension.  However, I can't think of any evidence for the type of raw overextension from the very beginning suggested by the learning pathway you propose.  Is there any empirical evidence for this?

Underspecification, as illustrated by the initial collective interpretation of distributive quantifiers such as "each" would seem to be a counterexample.  However, the conflict between distributive and collective interpretations is often a bit opaque in actual communicative contexts.

-- Brian MacWhinney

On Sep 25, 2014, at 2:09 PM, Grinstead, John <grinstead.11 at osu.edu> wrote:

> Hi Fritz,
> 
> It's interesting to think about an alternative to parameters, so thank you for starting a conversation.
> 
> That said, I can't really think of any syntactic phenomena that have the properties you have mentioned. That is, starting with one look and then completely switching to the opposite is pretty well unattested, as far as I can remember, at least in morphology, syntax, semantics (subjects, DO clitics, articles, mass-count, double objects, subject case, subject-aux inversion). All of these constructions get studied because there are variations from the adult patterns, but most of them are relatively subtle. 
> 
> So, child English speakers start using accusative case pronouns in subject position for a while (e.g. Him cry.), but don't switch to a completely Ergative-Absolutive system (not really sure what that would look like, anyway, but it would probably involve some interesting forms in object position that we don't ever see). Subject-verb agreement can take a while to develop in Spanish, but kids don't start marking direct object agreement (as in Swahili or Georgian) or indirect object agreement on verbs (as in Euskera) all of a sudden. 
> 
> Most constructions just look adult-like. 
> 
> It's like they're not willing to take a stab at a construction until they have a pretty good idea of what's going on and when they do, it looks pretty good. This is Stephen Crain's "conservative learner" (I think that was his phrase) and William Snyder's "Grammatical Conservatism".
> 
> The exceptions are not that numerous and they are what we spend most of our time thinking about.
> 
> Starting from something that seems unspecified and moving to something that's specified, on the other hand, is maybe more frequently observed. So Brooks and Syrett and Musolino and Pagliarini have observed in separate studies that children's interpretations of distributive quantifiers like "each" seem to allow them in collective situations. This tolerance gradually goes away and is replaced by a restrictive interpretation.
> 
> I hope that helps.
> 
> Best,
> 
> John
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> John Grinstead
> Associate Editor
> Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics
> Department of Spanish and Portuguese
> The Ohio State University
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> 
> Tel. 614.292.8856
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> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> From: Frederick Newmeyer <fredericknewmeyer at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: "info-childes at googlegroups.com" <info-childes at googlegroups.com>
> Date: Thursday, September 25, 2014 1:24 PM
> To: "info-childes at googlegroups.com" <info-childes at googlegroups.com>
> Subject: 'learning paths' instead of parameters
> 
> 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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