• Children are as often rewarded for speech errors as corrected
  

  underbrella

  beach-lookers (binoculars)

  tree-knocker (woodpecker)

• They receive no negative evidence, i.e. no evidence of speech errors which they also hear.

• No operant conditioning.

• At age when they cannot learn similarly complex systems

• Extrapolating grammar:

• we create and later discard complete grammars with which we generate new phrases until we have created a complete grammar of the target language.

• we seem to know syntactic order and the meaning of most morphemes by the age of two but we learn morphology in a consistent order.

possessor + possessed	mommy book
demonstrative + thing	this chair
subject + action	baby sleep
subject + quality	book big
subject + location	teddy bed
action + object	kick ball
action + location	sit chair

• Chronology of Language Learning

• Critical Period Theory

• At a specific period the brain is ready to learn language (Lenneberg)

• f at that period language is not learned, the language areas will be assigned other type(s) of processing (Wiesel & Hubel)

• Later attempts to learn language will be imperfect since that knowledge will be stored in areas not designed for language

• We can learn 2 or 3 languages as easily as 1 between ages 2-5 (roughly).

• No learning degeneration.  We learn all of the language even though they may not hear all the constructions. Imagine studying mathematics at Bucknell for four years and graduating knowing everything that your teachers know, regardless of your inherent "intelligence".