The Debates on Cognitive Mechanism of English Past Tense Acquisition
Dandan Liang · Shandong Foreign Language Teaching Journal · 2010
The late 1950s witnessed a growing interest,among linguists and cognitive scientists,in the acquisition of simple past tense in English;the RMM proposed in 1986 has spurred an overwhelming enthusiasm about this problem.Of all its possible explanations,four representative ones are reviewed in this paper: rule-governed mechanism by Chomsky and Halle,association-based mechanism as seen in RMM,Pinker's mechanism driven by association along with rules,and Yang's rule-governed mechanism focusing on gradualness of language development.Since the controversy over such a problem is far from coming to an end,its final solution is likely to be,in the years to come,some reconciliation of these mechanisms.