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<Paper uid="W05-0507">
  <Title>Item-based Constructions and the Logical Problem</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="64" end_page="65" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
5. Consequences and Conclusions
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This analysis sugests that we should not longer speak of language learning as being confined by the poverty of positive evidence or negative evidence. Both types of evidence are far more abundant than has been imagined. Nor should we assume that recovery from overgeneralization involves a fundamental logical problem. Recovery is suported by a set of four powerful processes (competition, cue construction, monitoring, and indirect negative evidence) that provide redundant and complementary solutions to the logical problem. In addition, we know that alternative characterizations of the nature of the target grammar can  take much of the logical bit out of the logical problem. Finally, we have seen that the language addressed to children is not at all unparsable or degenerate, once a few superficial retracing structures are repaired.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> We have reviewed seven solutions to the logical problem that work together to buffer the process of language acquisition. When we consider the interaction of the seven solutions in this way, we son come to realize the pivotal role played by the item-based construction. First, the item-based construction directly enforces conservatism by requiring that each generalization of each argument frame be based on directly observable positive evidence.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Second, the probabilistic competition between item-based constructions provides a meaningful way of understanding the probabilistic nature of grammar. Third, the competition between item-based constructions directly promotes recovery from overgeneralization. Fourth, the additional mechanisms of cue construction, indirect negative evidence, and monitoring serve to fine-tune the operations of competition. These processes operate particularly in those cases where uniqueness is not fuly transparent or where the restriction of a general process requires additional fine-tuning of cues. The current analysis assigns great importance to god positive data. Marcus (193) has sugested that parents are inconsistent in their provision of negative evidence to the child. But the Competition Model assumes that it is positive data that is crucial for learning. One way in which a parent can provide crucial positive evidence is through recasting, but other methods are posible to. In various cultures and subgroups, positive evidence can be presented and focused through elicited repetition, choral recitation of stories, interaction with siblings, or games. Methods that emphasize shared attention and shared understanding can guide children toward the control of literate expression. This shared attention can arise in groups of co-wives in Central Africa just as easily as it can from isolated mother-child dyads in New England.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Recently, Hauser, Chomsky, &amp; Fitch (202) have argued that the core evolutionary adaptation that was required to suport human language involved the introduction of a facility for recursion. The analysis in the current paper modifies and extends this claim by emphasizing the evolutionary (MacWhiney, 205) and developmental (Tomasello, 200) centrality of the item-based construction as the controler of recursive composition of phrases and sentences. However MacWhinney (205) views linguistic recursion as emerging gradually from preexisting structures in spatial cognition, rather than as appearing sudenly during the Late Pleistocene. Studies of the functional neural underpinings of recursion can go a long ways toward clarifying the details of these isues.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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