On the study of first language acquisition
type: Item
instance of: scholarly article
title: On the study of first language acquisition
zbMATH Open document ID: 0843.92032
author: Scott Weinstein
author: Daniel N. Osherson
published in: Journal of Mathematical Psychology
publication date: 1996-08-21T00:00:00Z
review text: Human languages are immensely complicated systems for pairing sounds with meanings, yet most infants can acquire any one of them from a few years of sustained, casual contact. However difficult it is to give sharp expression to this phenomenon, few students of language have failed to be impressed by the child's achievement. It is thus not surprising that many questions about language acquisition have been posed and investigated, including the following questions: (a) From among the vast class of logically possible languages, which can in fact be assimilated by children on the basis of the kind of linguistic experience typically afforded the young? That is, which languages are ``natural''? (b) What is the mental mechanism upon which language acquisition rests? Question (a) requests an illuminating characterization of the class of learnable languages, for example, by formally specifying a class of grammars rich enough to represent any such language but none others. Question (b) requests information about the program embodied by the child's nervous system, the program allowing children to arrive at a stable and accurate representation of the ambient language in case the latter is of the human sort. Both questions presuppose familiar idealizations of linguistic competence that have been discussed many times. Rather than reexamine these idealizations, we intend to rely upon them for the purposes of projecting (a,b) into a recursion-theoretic framework. The framework will allow us to represent developmental psycholinguistics as a process of theory-discovery within a formally defined paradigm of empirical inquiry. It will then be possible to consider in mathematical terms the prospects for success in this enterprise. The ensuing discussion proceeds as follows. The next section reviews the definition of ``language identification from text'', due to \textit{E. M. Gold} [Inform. and Control 10, 447-474 (1967; Zbl 0259.68032)]. These definitions constitute our model of the chi…
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 91F20
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 91E40
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 91E10
zbMATH DE Number: 806628
zbMATH Keywords: first language acquisition
zbMATH Keywords: language identification from text
zbMATH Keywords: child's discovery problem
zbMATH Keywords: developmental psycholinguists
MaRDI profile type: Publication
full work available at URL: jmps.1995.1016
OpenAlex ID: W1977879597
DOI: 10.1006/JMPS.1995.1016
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description: scientific article; zbMATH DE number 806628