Seidenberg M S
Neuroscience Program, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2520, USA.
Science. 1997 Mar 14;275(5306):1599-603. doi: 10.1126/science.275.5306.1599.
What kinds of knowledge underlie the use of language and how is this knowledge acquired? Linguists equate knowing a language with knowing a grammar. Classic "poverty of the stimulus" arguments suggest that grammar identification is an intractable inductive problem and that acquisition is possible only because children possess innate knowledge of grammatical structure. An alternative view is emerging from studies of statistical and probabilistic aspects of language, connectionist models, and the learning capacities of infants. This approach emphasizes continuity between how language is acquired and how it is used. It retains the idea that innate capacities constrain language learning, but calls into question whether they include knowledge of grammatical structure.
语言运用基于何种知识，以及这种知识是如何习得的？语言学家将掌握一门语言等同于掌握一种语法。经典的“刺激匮乏”论点表明，语法识别是一个难以解决的归纳问题，而语言习得之所以可能，只是因为儿童拥有语法结构的先天知识。一种不同的观点正从对语言的统计和概率方面、联结主义模型以及婴儿学习能力的研究中浮现出来。这种方法强调语言习得方式与使用方式之间的连续性。它保留了先天能力限制语言学习的观点，但对这些能力是否包括语法结构知识提出了质疑。
