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<Paper uid="P99-1055">
  <Title>A Selectionist Theory of Language Acquisition</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="433" end_page="433" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
4 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> To capitulate, this paper first argues that considerations of language development must be taken seriously to evaluate computational models of language acquisition. Once we do so, both statistical learning approaches and traditional UG-based learnability studies are empirically inadequate. We proposed an alternative model which views language acquisition as a selectionist process in which grammars form a population and compete to match linguistic* expressions present in the environment. The course and outcome of acquisition are determined by the relative compatibilities of the grammars with input data; such compatibilities, expressed in penalty probabilities and unambiguous evidence, are quantifiable and empirically testable, allowing us to make direct predictions about language development.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The biologically endowed linguistic knowledge enables the learner to go beyond unanalyzed distributional properties of the input data. We argued in section 1.1 that it is a mistake to model language acquisition as directly learning the probabilistic distribution of the linguistic data. Rather, language acquisition is guided by particular input evidence that serves to disambiguate the target grammar from the competing grammars. The ability to use such evidence for grammar selection is based on the learner's linguistic knowledge. Once such knowledge is assumed, the actual process of language acquisition is no more remarkable than generic psychological models of learning. The selectionist theory, if correct, show an example of the interaction between domain-specific knowledge and domain-neutral mechanisms, which combine to explain properties of language and cognition.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>