Overgeneralizations, competition, and recovery: solving the logical problem with positive evidence

Abstract

It would seem to be incomplete for any introduction to language acquisition to leave the ‘logical problem of language acquisition’ untouched – in fact, it would seem to be logical to just start the introduction with the logical problem. MacWhinney lays out a proposal here that attempts to dismantle the logical structure of the logical problem: there is no logical problem, if we consider carefully (a) the actual input that children receive from parents, and (b) the mechanisms that children use to handle possible pitfalls in extracting grammar from the input.