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This article provides an overview of a probabilistic constraints framework for thinking about language acquisition and processing. The generative approach attempts to characterize knowledge of language (i.e., competence grammar) and then asks how this knowledge is acquired and used. Our approach is performance oriented: the goal is to explain how people comprehend and produce utterances and how children acquire this skill. Use of language involves exploiting multiple probabilistic constraints over various types of linguistic and nonlinguistic information. Acquisition is the process of accumulating this information, which begins in infancy. The constraint satisfaction processes that are central to language use are the same as the bootstrapping processes that provide entry to language for the child. Framing questions about acquisition in terms of models of adult performance unifies the two topics under a set of common principles and has important consequences for arguments concerning lan...

Selective deficits in aphasics patients ’ grammatical production and comprehension are often cited as evidence that syntactic processing is modular and localizable in discrete areas of the brain (e.g., Y. Grodzinsky, 2000). The authors review a large body of experimental evidence suggesting that morphosyntactic deficits can be observed in a number of aphasic and neurologically intact populations. They present new data showing that receptive agrammatism is found not only over a range of aphasic groups, but is also observed in neurologically intact individuals processing under stressful conditions. The authors suggest that these data are most compatible with a domain-general account of language, one that emphasizes the interaction of linguistic distributions with the properties of an associative processor working under normal or suboptimal conditions. The primary purpose of this article is to provide empirical arguments in support of a new view of language deficits and their neural correlates, particularly in the realm of syntax. Selective syntactic deficits are often cited as evidence that the human brain contains a bounded and well-defined faculty or module dedicated exclusively to the representation and/or processing of syntax (Caplan & Waters, 1999; Grodzinsky, 1995a,

Where does grammar come from? How does it develop in children? Developmental psycholinguists who set out to answer these questions quickly find themselves impaled upon the horns of a dilemma, caught up in a modern variant of the ancient war between empiricists and nativists. Indeed, some of the fiercest battles in this war have been waged in the field of child language. Many reasonable individuals in this field have argued for a middle ground, but such a compromise has proven elusive thus far, in part because the middle ground is difficult to define. So let us begin with some definitions. The core of this debate is about epistemology, a branch of philosophy that we can define as “The study of knowledge, its form and source, and the process by which it comes to be. ” Within this framework, empiricism can be defined as “The belief that knowledge originates in the environment and comes into the mind/brain through the

Most of us would like to believe that the different patterns of language breakdown observed in aphasic patients reflect the way that the human mind and brain are organized for language. However, because so much modern research on aphasia has been carried out in English, it is difficult to separate universal mechanisms from language-specific content. Crosslinguistic com-parisons permit us to disentangle these confounds, while we address one of the most important issues in cognitive neurobiology, the issue of behavioral and neural plasticity: How many different forms can the language processor take under a range of normal and abnormal conditions? We must have an answer to this question if we want to understand what the neural mechanisms responsible for language

this article represents a step toward just such a rethinking of the linguistic endeavor.

This study investigated question production in agrammatic aphasia, focusing on the comparison between Wh questions and yes/no questions and on the interaction between the question production deficit and language-specific properties. A total of 16 agrammatic aphasics (13 Hebrew speakers, 2 Palestinian Arabic speakers, and 1 English speaker) participated in the study, which included sentence elicitation and repetition tasks. In addition, the patients ’ spontaneous speech, containing 2272 utterances, was analyzed. The main findings were that Hebrewand Arabic-speaking agrammatics encounter severe difficulties in Wh question production but retain the ability to produce yes/no questions. English-speaking agrammatics do not show this dissociation and can form neither Wh nor yes/no questions. These dissociations as well as the error pattern, are explained by reference to the Tree Pruning Hypothesis, according to which the highest nodes of the syntactic tree, which are required for Wh questions in Hebrew, Arabic, and English and for yes/no questions in English, are impaired or inaccessible in agrammatism.

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