Psychology 2134A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Pacifier, Phoneme, Primitive Reflexes

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2134A/B
• Professor: Marc Joanisse

Document Summary

Potentially an infinite number of rules to come up with when there"s no definite rule. Must be more than one shape (could be infinite) What this has to do with learning language. Children have to learn grammatical rules using the evidence in their environment: e. g. , the input that they get, positive evidence . They don"t get examples of what"s not grammatical: there"s no negative evidence . No explicit grammatical utterances given to children that is incorrect. Chomsky: the logical problem of language acquisition . Children receive impoverished inputs: only a subset of all possible grammatical sentences, sometimes also ungrammatical sentences. Children get very little feedback about grammar: parents mostly correct when they say things that aren"t true. Also not certain that they attend to negative evidence when they do get it. Mapping language onto pre-existing biases (only can come up with certain kinds of grammar: born with a universal grammar. Language develops along a relatively fixed trajectory: develop quite rapidly.