Language learning from positive evidence, reconsidered: A simplicity-based approach

TL;DR

This paper revisits how children can learn language from positive evidence alone by favoring the simplest grammatical encoding, providing formal results and empirical testability for this approach.

Contribution

It demonstrates that a simplicity-based learning model can successfully acquire language from positive evidence, addressing logical challenges in language acquisition theories.

Findings

Learners can acquire linguistic predictions and grammaticality judgements from positive evidence.

The simplicity approach scales to specific linguistic constructions.

The framework is empirically testable for human language acquisition.

Abstract

Children learn their native language by exposure to their linguistic and communicative environment, but apparently without requiring that their mistakes are corrected. Such learning from positive evidence has been viewed as raising logical problems for language acquisition. In particular, without correction, how is the child to recover from conjecturing an over-general grammar, which will be consistent with any sentence that the child hears? There have been many proposals concerning how this logical problem can be dissolved. Here, we review recent formal results showing that the learner has sufficient data to learn successfully from positive evidence, if it favours the simplest encoding of the linguistic input. Results include the ability to learn a linguistic prediction, grammaticality judgements, language production, and form-meaning mappings. The simplicity approach can also be scaled-down to analyse the ability to learn a specific linguistic constructions, and is amenable to empirical test as a framework for describing human language acquisition.