In just a few years, children achieve a stable state of linguistic competence, making them effectively adults with respect to: understanding novel sentences, discerning relations of paraphrase and entailment, acceptability judgments, etc. One familiar account of the language acquisition process treats it as an induction problem of the sort that arises in any domain where the knowledge achieved ...

Recent demonstrations of statistical learning in infants have reinvigorated the innateness versus learning debate in language acquisition. This article addresses these issues from both computational and developmental perspectives. First, I argue that statistical learning using transitional probabilities cannot reliably segment words when scaled to a realistic setting (e.g. child-directed Englis...

the present study was an attempt to investigate the acquisition of negationproperties by persian monolingual and kurdish-persian bilingual learners of englishacross different levels of language proficiency and within a generative framework.generative models are generally concerned with issues such as universal grammar(ug), language transfer, and morphological variability in nonprimary languaged...

Reading has universal properties that can be seen across the world’s writing systems. The most important one is the universal language constraint: All writing systems represent spoken languages, a universal with consequences for reading processes. These consequences are seen most clearly at the broad principle level: the principle that reading universally requires the reader to make links to la...

One important issue in current language acquisition research is whether the of a second fundamentally different from that first language. Researchers approaching (SLA) linguistic perspective often relate this to availability Universal Grammar acquisition. The main focus paper examine role and what extent it plays process. To illustrate this, four access hypotheses or theories were given.
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Much has been written about the unlikelihood of innate, syntax-specific, universal knowledge of language (Universal Grammar) on the grounds that it is biologically implausible, unresponsive to cross-linguistic facts, theoretically inelegant, and implausible and unnecessary from the perspective of language acquisition. While relevant, much of this discussion fails to address the sorts of facts t...

Sentential adverbs are often assumed to be situated in front of the verb phrase in arbitrary order. In a recent monograph, however, Cinque (1999) claims that the relative order of sentential adverbs may, in principle, be universally fixed. In this paper I first give a brief presentation of Cinque’s proposal. Then I present a pilot study of sentential adverbs in English and Swedish. This study i...

the common belief among a great number of linguists and psycholinguists is that the solution to the problem of language acquisition, also called the projection problem or plato’s problem, lies within the prior knowledge. one hypothesis that constitutes the foundation of this belief is that the gap between the child-exposed input (primary data) and the linguistic system (linguistic competence) i...