LING 1010 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Text Segmentation, Voice-Onset Time, Categorical Perception

• School: UConn
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 1010
• Professor: Jon Gajewski

Document Summary

Logical problem of language acquisition: children are able to learn language despite not having enough evidence to learn it. Positive evidence: evidence about which items are present in the infinite set: problem with positive evidence is that there is no guarantee that the relevant evidence will be given. Negative evidence: evidence about which items are absent in the infinite set. You can use negative evidence to test hypotheses until you find the right one: for the most part, children don"t make use of negative evidence. They either ignore the negative evidence or misinterpret it: negative evidence would be negative reactions, corrections of grammar, databases show there is not enough negative evidence. Two approaches: modern nativism: substantial innate knowledge, but experience plays a small role as well, modern empiricism: experience plays the largest role in learning, though innate knowledge plays a small role.