Language Acquisition and Virtual Grammars On the continuity of cognition
Mike de Kreek · 2003
The ideas that led to the theory of Data Oriented Processing [Scha 1990] consider analogy-making processes as the core of human language cognition. This theory has become an attractive framework for the modeling of adult language performance as it explains more language phenomena than most other theories. The core of the theory is an analogy-making algorithm which assigns an interpretation to new linguistic input, using a corpus of structured past language experiences. Obviously, an infant does not arrive in this world with a set of past language experiences. The main topic in this work is how the first, more or less structured language experiences could come about. Or, in other words: what kind of language processing mechanisms must be added to the DOP-framework in order to account not only for adult language use, but also for language acquisition? The power to make generalizations plays a major role in the research tradition that grounds the first linguistic constructions in prelinguistic structures