Psychology 2134A/B Lecture : Language Development

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

Document Summary

The answer is not a simple one, in light of how we have characterized language so far in this course. We have a mental grammar that contains a great deal of information. Much of it is quite abstract and not totally obvious from what they get as input. For instance knowing that their language follows svo word order requires that they first learn what a subject, verb and object are, which itself requires them to learn what nouns and verbs are. None of this information is directly present on the input that they receive (e. g. , in the cat chased the dog, each phrase is not already labeled as the subject, verb or object, let alone. And we also know that children have to learn this very quickly. First: take a look at this activity (learnability note). In contrast, if you get negative evidence (what is not allowed), the task is much easier.