LING 1010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Formant, Categorical Perception, Language Production

• School: UConn
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 1010
• Professor: Akihiko Arano( T A)

Document Summary

Knowledge that cannot be acquired through experience. A subset is a set contained within another set. Sets can be infinite, meaning they can contain an infinite amount of numbers of items. In language, learning infinite sets from finite subsets is impossible without help. Also, only certain types of help are actually helpful. Positive evidence- ask someone to produce more numbers in the set. But there is no guarantee that we will get the relevant evidence which will allow us to eliminate the incorrect sets and settle on the correct one. Negative evidence- evidence about which items are absent from the infinite set. Fact 1: all human languages can be characterized by an infinite set of sentences. Fact 2: the input that children receive when learning their language is finite. Fact 3:all children succeed in learning language. Fact 4:negative evidence would guarantee that the infinite set can be learned. Fact 5:but children do not make use of negative evidence.