All P's or mixed vegetables?

摘要

In a beautifully written, cogently argued paper MacDonald (2013), presents the theoretical framework that guides one of the most creative and influential research programs in the language sciences. The PDC began with empirical demonstrations that readers are remarkably sensitive to distributional patterns in the input. These empirical demonstrations were accompanied by theoretical arguments that ambiguity resolution can be modeled by constraint-based (probabilistic) systems that learn these patterns from experience (also see Tanenhaus and Trueswell, 1995; Tabor et al., 1997). This research was part of a wave of research in the 1990's that answered long-standing questions in real-time language comprehension and early language acquisition, with variations of “It's the input, stupid” (e.g., Saffran, Aslin, and Newport's seminal work on statistical learning, Saffran et al., 1996).