How big is minimal?

Mellow, J. Dean

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2007.03.006

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Linguistic nativism states that humans have a set of genetically-determined capacities by which to master and use a natural language (the language faculty, Chomsky, 1972;Jackendoff, 2002;Pinker & Bloom, 1990), though the contents of this faculty and whether it is language or human specific remain uncertain (Hauser et al, 2002;Jackendoff & Pinker, 2005;Larson et al, 2010;van der Hulst, 2010). Language learning is a process whereby learners conceive, assess, and reject hypotheses on the properties of the exposed language (Mellow, 2008b). Some nativists (e.g.…”

Section:  the Coevolutionary Scenario Of Language Originmentioning

confidence: 99%

Simulating the coevolution of compositionality and word order regularity

Gong

2011

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This paper proposes a coevolutionary scenario on the origins of compositionality and word order regularity in human language, and illustrates it using a multi-agent, behavioral model. The model traces a 'bottom-up' process of syntactic development; artificial agents, by iterating local orders among lexical items, gradually build up basic constituent word order(s) in sentences. These results show that structural features of language (e.g. syntactic categories and word orders) could have coevolved with lexical items, as a consequence of general learning mechanisms (e.g. pattern extraction and sequential learning) initially not language-specific.

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