LING449P

Some parts of language acquisition are harder than others. Among the hard stuff, there are some cases where children seem to face a learnability problem: they have incorrect representations that result in their grammars generating all of the sentences that adult grammars do, but also other sentences that adult grammars do not generate. It seems that children nevertheless 'recover' from this overgeneration state. The question is: how? In this course we will examine cases of learnability puzzles that children somehow manage to recover from, develop hypotheses about how children do this, and plan experimental studies that would test these hypotheses.