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Edinburgh Occasional Papers in Linguistics September 22, 1997
The evolution of incremental learning: language,
development and critical periods
Simon Kirby & James R Hurford
simon@ling.ed.ac.uk

1 Introduction In this article 1 , we show how the existence of critical periods follows from the action of natural selection on genomes in which incremental growth can be tuned to chronological age (maturation) or to accumulating input. 2 This article brings together conclusions from two previous papers in Cognition (Hurford 1991, Elman 1993) which have been thought to be incompatible. The key concepts in our discussion are: 1. Incremental growth in cognitive resources, as facilitating language acquisition 2. The nature of the genome's control over such incremental growth -- whether growth is a function of maturation or of exposure to data 3. Darwinian natural selection 4. Critical periods in language acquisition The last of these is our explanandum; we will locate these concepts in an explanatory framework, and outline a mechanism, computationally implemented, relating them to each other. Our discussion is concentrated on language acquisition, but our conclusions can be applied to development more generally, so in principle ``language acquisition'' above can be replaced simply by ``development'' (mutatis mutandis). In the next section (Sec.2), we briefly review the evidence for critical (or sensitive) periods in language acquisition; in Section 3, we describe the principal structural properties of lan­ guage acquisition models that rely on the idea of incremental growth, with specific focus on Newport's ``Less is More'' hypothesis and Elman's ``Importance of Starting Small''; in Sec­ tion 4, we identify two elements crucially missing from such models, timing and evolution; the remaining sections of the paper set out our own explanatory framework, and report the results of computational simulations. 2 Critical periods Long (1990) has provided a valuable survey of the ...

@techreport{kirby97theEvolution,
  author={S. Kirby and J. Hurford},
  title={The evolution of incremental learning: language, development and critical periods},
  year={1997},
  institution={Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit, University of Edinburgh},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/kirby97theEvolution.html},
  keywords={critical period, language acquisition, language evolution, computer simulation}
}

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