Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition
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...In constructivist usagebased approaches, children are assumed to build up syntactic categories and structures of their language gradually, using cues such as frequency and regularity of specific constructions (e.g., Lieven et al. 2003; Tomasello 2003a; 2009)....
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...In fact, constructionist theories argue that language must be learnable from positive input together with fairly general cognitive abilities [18, 29 ,38], because the diversity and complexity witnessed does not yield to accounts that assume that cross-linguistic variation can be characterized in terms of a finite set of parameters [37]....
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...It turns out that the input need not be nearly as impoverished as is sometimes assumed [39]; analogical processes can be seen to be viable once function as well as form is taken into account [40,41]; there is good reason to think that children’s early grammar is quite conservative, with generalizations emerging only slowly [ 29 ,42,43]; and the ability to record transitional probabilities and statistical generalizations in the input has ......
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