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From: pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
Message-ID: <D3LGHJ.LpM@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>
Organization: UTCC Public Access
References: <D38qGn.H6L@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca> <D3C4uG.DFK@spss.com> <D3DsyK.1tt@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> <D3Fpv3.8o2@spss.com>
Date: Mon, 6 Feb 1995 19:51:19 GMT
Lines: 34

In article <D3Fpv3.8o2@spss.com>, Mark Rosenfelder <markrose@spss.com> wrote:
:
>There's some stages of language acquisition where this might be true-- 
>infants learning names of things, for instance-- but I don't see that it's
>even approximately true of the process as a whole.  Children start speaking
>by babbling, for instance, which is hardly copying anything they hear.
>A two-year-old's sentences are almost entirely novel, not copied from
>any adult utterance, and indeed violating many rules of adult grammar.

I can only speak from my own experience with two-year-old's (and it has been
quite a few years since) but their sentences are mostly ad-hoc combinations
of the elements of the language they have heard. They are able to parse
the speach they hear into words and they combine them according to patterns 
they have discerned. What is your definition of "almost entirely novel"?
Children are copying the words they have heard and phrases they have heard,
what is the novelty you are talking about?

>And children are often highly resistant to grammatical correction, which
>they shouldn't be if they're just copying what they hear.
>
They are resistant to grammatical corrections precisely _because_ they are
copying what they hear, with most obvious patterns imprinitng on them most
strongly. They listen to the language all the time, most of which you are not
aware that they are listening. Occasional corrections rarely have enough 
weight to influence the strongest patterns. As they grow up, they start to
notice more and more subtle patterns and then corrections have more chance to
have influence.

Andrzej
-- 
Andrzej Pindor                        The foolish reject what they see and 
University of Toronto                 not what they think; the wise reject
Instructional and Research Computing  what they think and not what they see.
pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca                           Huang Po
