Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262034319
- eISBN:
- 9780262334778
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262034319.003.0006
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Psycholinguistics / Neurolinguistics / Cognitive Linguistics
The multiple-cue integration perspective on language acquisition highlights the rich nature of the input. In combination with the emphasis on the cultural evolution of language, this points to an ...
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The multiple-cue integration perspective on language acquisition highlights the rich nature of the input. In combination with the emphasis on the cultural evolution of language, this points to an experience-based account of language processing, in which exposure to language plays a crucial role in determining language ability. The sixth chapter therefore emphasizes the importance of experience for understanding language processing, focusing on the processing of relative clauses as an example. Evidence from corpus analyses, computational modeling, and psycholinguistic experimentation demonstrates that variation in relative clause processing—including differences across individuals—can be explained by variations in linguistic experience. Additional experimental data suggest that individual differences in domain-general abilities for sequence learning and memory-based chunking, in turn, may affect individuals’ ability to learn from linguistic experience. It is concluded that our language abilities emerge through complex interactions between linguistic experience and multiple constraints deriving from learning and processing.Less
The multiple-cue integration perspective on language acquisition highlights the rich nature of the input. In combination with the emphasis on the cultural evolution of language, this points to an experience-based account of language processing, in which exposure to language plays a crucial role in determining language ability. The sixth chapter therefore emphasizes the importance of experience for understanding language processing, focusing on the processing of relative clauses as an example. Evidence from corpus analyses, computational modeling, and psycholinguistic experimentation demonstrates that variation in relative clause processing—including differences across individuals—can be explained by variations in linguistic experience. Additional experimental data suggest that individual differences in domain-general abilities for sequence learning and memory-based chunking, in turn, may affect individuals’ ability to learn from linguistic experience. It is concluded that our language abilities emerge through complex interactions between linguistic experience and multiple constraints deriving from learning and processing.
