This paper presents a formal model of language acquistion that, in addition to meeting the traditional learnability condition, makes time-course predictions about child language development. We view language acquistin as a population of human grammars, made available by UG, compete in a selectionist process. Selection is made possible by the variational propertis of individual grammars; specifically, their differential ocmpatibility with the primary linguistic data in the environment.
展开▼
