Abstract
Language is learned, in the course of the everyday events of the first five years of life by children bright and dull, eager or sullen, pampered or abused, exposed to Urdu or to English. This universal learning despite varying environments poses a problem to general inductive theories of language learning. This is largely because the rich input data would seem to allow the learner to form a bewildering number of generalizations, many of them absurd. Along with some others, we argue that the child has specific dispositions about how to organize and represent linguistic stimulation, and that it is these representational biases that rescue his inductions from potentially unlimited pitfalls.
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Gleitman, L.R., Wanner, E. (1984). Richly Specified Input to Language Learning. In: Selfridge, O.G., Rissland, E.L., Arbib, M.A. (eds) Adaptive Control of Ill-Defined Systems. NATO Conference Series, vol 16. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-8941-5_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-8941-5_16
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