I review the classic literature in generative grammar and Marr's three-level program for cognitive science to defend the Evaluation Metric as a psychological theory of language learning. Focusing on well-established facts of language variation, change, and use, I argue that optimal statistical principles embodied in Bayesian inference models are…

Generative approaches to language have long recognized the natural link between theories of knowledge representation and theories of knowledge acquisition. The basic idea is that the knowledge representations provided by Universal Grammar enable children to acquire language as reliably as they do because these representations highlight the…

We study the learnability problem concerning the dative alternations in English (Baker, 1979; Pinker, 1989). We consider how first language learners productively apply the double-object and to-dative constructions ("give the book to library"/"give the library the book"), while excluding negative exceptions ("donate the…