Incorporating learning into theories of parsing
Evan Kidd · Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism · 2015
ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of LanguageIn their target article, Phillips and Ehrenhofer (2015; P&E) present a sketch of how concepts and methods from adult language processing could be used to illuminate first and second language acquisition.This is by no means the first attempt to find common ground between fields that often work independently of each other (e.g., for L1: Fodor, 1998aFodor, , 1998b;; Frazier & De Villiers, 1990;O'Grady, 2005;Trueswell & Gleitman, 2004, for L1 & L2: MacWhinney & Bates, 1989).Regardless, one broad aim of psycholinguistics should be to integrate sub-disciplines, and in this sense the article is a welcome addition to the literature.In this vein, P&E argue that adult psycholinguistics can provide important and novel insights into the acquisition of grammars.In this commentary I concentrate on the converse of this argument: how insights from language acquisition can provide equally important contributions to adult psycholinguistics.My broad thesis is that processing considerations not only constrain learning, but that learning constrains the developing parser, such that we can see the footprints of acquisition in the end-state processing system.Due to space limitations I restrict my discussion to L1 acquisition.