This paper is intended to elucidate some implications of usage-based linguistic theory for statistical and computational models of language acquisition, focusing on morphology and morphophonology. I discuss the need for grammar (a.k.a. abstraction), the contents of individual grammars (a potentially infinite number of constructions, paradig- matic mappings and predictive relationships between phonological units), the computational characteristics of constructions (complex non-crossover interactions among partially redundant features), resolution of competition among constructions (probability matching), and the need for multimodel inference in modeling internal grammars underlying the linguistic performance of a community.??.
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