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Positive and Negative Evidence in Language Acquisition

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2021-02-08 21:49
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2021年2月8日发(作者:aut)


Positive and Negative Evidence in Language Acquisition


1



Introduction


The necessity for input in the process of second language acquisition (SLA) is a


well-accepted fact, but the form and type that it needs to take for learning to occur


remains a controversial issue. Those subscribing to a nativist or rationalist position of


acquisition support the idea that positive evidence is all that is required for acquisition


to occur (Chomsky, 1989). They believe that human knowledge develops from


structures, processes and ideas that are in the mind at the birth. On the other hand, those


working within the interactionist paradigm see positive evidence as insufficient and


propose a role for both positive and negative evidence (Labov, 1969; Gass, 2003).



2. Positive Evidence


Positive evidence is evidence that a particular utterance is grammatical in the language


that the language that the child is learning. It consists of descriptive information about a


form or an utterance. It consists of actually occurring sequences, i.e. sentences of the


language. Various options exist for positive evidence including plentiful exemplars of


the target feature without any device to draw attention to it. For example, Trahey (1996)


developed materials consisting of stories, games, and exercises with the aim of simply


exposing learners to the subject. In this case, acquisition occurs as a result of frequent


exposure to a target feature. It involves some sort of attempt to highlight instances of the


target feature, thus drawing learners' attention to it.


Positive evidence can function entirely by itself. Learners can simply be asked to listen


to or read texts that have been provided. It can also be accompanied by some kind of


meaning-focused activity that incidentally assists learners to focus their attention on the


target feature.




For example, comprehension questions that can only be answered correctly if the


learners process the target feature. There are tasks that are designed to elicit production


of a specific target feature in the context of performing a communicative task, and tasks


that are intended to result in learners' employing some feature that has been specifically


targeted (White, 1987).



Several patterns in language have been claimed to be unlearnable from positive


evidence alone. One example is the hierarchical nature of languages. For any given set


of sentences generated by a hierarchical grammar capable of infinite recursion there are


an indefinite number of grammars that could have produced the same data. This would


make learning any such language impossible. Indeed, a proof by E. Mark Gold showed


that any formal language that has hierarchical structure capable of infinite recursion is


unlearnable from positive evidence alone,


[




in the sense that it is impossible to


formulate a procedure that will discover with certainty the correct grammar given any


arbitrary sequence of positive data in which each utterance occurs at least once.


However, this does not preclude arriving at the correct grammar using typical input


sequences rather than particularly malicious sequences or arrive at an almost perfect


approximation to the correct grammar.




Another example of language pattern claimed to be unlearnable from positive evidence


alone is subject-auxiliary inversion in questions, i.e.:


?



?



You are happy.



Are you happy?



There are two hypotheses the language learner might postulate about how to form


questions: (1) The first auxiliary verb in the sentence (here: 'are') moves to the


beginning of the sentence, or (2) the 'main' auxiliary verb in the sentence moves to the


front. In the sentence above, both rules yield the same result since there is only one


auxiliary verb. But, the difference is apparent in this case:


?



Anyone who is interested can see me later.



Is anyone who interested can see me later?



Can anyone who is interested see me later?



1.



2.



Of course, the result of rule (1) is ungrammatical while the result of rule (2) is


grammatical. So, rule (2) is (approximately) what we actually have in English, not rule


(1). The claim, then, first is that children don't see sentences as complicated as this one


enough to witness a case where the two hypotheses yield different results, and second


that just based on the positive evidence of the simple sentences, children could not


possibly decide between (1) and (2). Moreover, even sentences such as (1) and (2) are


compatible with a number of incorrect rules (such as


(2) was not innately known to infants, we would expect half of the adult population to


use (1) and half to use (2). Since that doesn't occur, rule (2) must be innately known.



3. Negative Evidence


Negative evidence refers to information about which strings of words are not


grammatical sentences in the language, such as corrections or other forms of feedback


from a parent that tell the child that one of his or her utterances is ungrammatical.


Negative evidence consists of information about the impossibility and ungrammaticality


of a form or an utterance. In other words, negative evidence such as explanations,


explicit grammar teachings, and corrections of wrong sequences or ungrammatical


sentences, show what may not be done. It needs additional evidence from corrections of


impossible sequences, reading the rule-books, comprehending abstract explanations,


and so on. There are times when a learner supplies a linguistically incorrect response in


reply to a teacher's initiation; the teacher tends to provide direct, explicit, overt negative


evidence. However, Chomsky (1981) holds the idea that direct negative evidence is not


necessary for language acquisition, but indirect negative evidence may be relevant.


It's very important for us to know whether children get and need negative, because in


the absence of negative evidence, any child who hypothesizes a rule that generates a


superset of the language will have no way of knowing that he or she is wrong. If


children don't get, or don't use, negative evidence, they must have some mechanism that


either avoids generating too large a language the child would be conservative -- or that


can recover from such overgeneration.



There is also much criticism about whether negative evidence is really so rarely


encountered by children. Pullum argues that learners probably do get certain kinds of

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