ERIC Number: EJ730257
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2004-Sep
Pages: 9
Abstractor: Author
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0010-0277
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Learning the Unlearnable: The Role of Missing Evidence
Regier, Terry; Gahl, Susanne
Cognition, v93 n2 p147-155 Sep 2004
Syntactic knowledge is widely held to be partially innate, rather than learned. In a classic example, it is sometimes argued that children know the proper use of anaphoric "one," although that knowledge could not have been learned from experience. Lidz et al. [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn't have learned: Experimental evidence for syntactic structure at 18 months. "Cognition," 89, B65-B73.] pursue this argument, and present corpus and experimental evidence that appears to support it; they conclude that specific aspects of this knowledge must be innate. We demonstrate, "contra" Lidz et al., that this knowledge may in fact be acquired from the input, through a simple Bayesian learning procedure. The learning procedure succeeds because it is sensitive to the "absence" of particular input patterns--an aspect of learning that is apparently overlooked by Lidz et al. More generally, we suggest that a prominent form of the ''argument from poverty of the stimulus'' suffers from the same oversight, and is as a result logically unsound.
Descriptors: Learning Processes, Syntax, Language Acquisition, Cognitive Development, Infants, Semantics, Language Patterns, Bayesian Statistics, Cognitive Processes
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
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