Social Lifts Must Go Upstairs: Artificial Input and Mechanisms of Language Acquisition by Children

摘要

Children need a rich linguistic input for the sake of better mastering of their native language. However, for many socio-economic reasons they lack it if their parents 1) belong to the low SES families and are not motivated enough to educate their children; 2) are migrants and do not fluently speak the language of the surrounding; 3) are well-doing and professionally motivated but do not have enough time to communicate with their children; or if the children 4) demonstrate language deficits and disorders. We propose to create an Artificial Input Machine (AIM) with language-specific content organized as samples of Child-Directed Speech (CDS) that benefit from using of the "bootstrapping mechanisms" of the given language. The proposal described here is based on Russian data.