Scott Woods's son is, I imagine, about four or five. That's usually the age that children make irregular verbs regular by analogy.  Whatever age he is, he has certainly not reached the critical period before which natural unconscious learning by analogy is considered one of the features of what used to be called the LAD (language acquisition device).    However, after the critical period, this ability is supposed to atrophy. It is for this reason that we cannot use the way young children acquire language as evidence of how post-puberty learners might do so.***
 
Ron Sheen
 
***But see Selinker's 1972 Interlanguage article for the argument that some people do retain that ability and are considered to be gifted learners.
 
----- Original Message -----
From: [log in to unmask] href="mailto:[log in to unmask]">Scott Woods
To: [log in to unmask] href="mailto:[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2007 7:18 AM
Subject: Re: Inductive - Deductive:was New discussion intelligence and grammar learning

Don't we induce most grammar rules?  My son recently used the word "sitted" instead of the standard "sat."  This seems to be a generalization of the rule for making past tense applied to a word which doesn't make its past tense that way.  He has rarely, if ever, heard the word "sitted," and often heard the word "sat," yet the generalization from the maybe tens of thousands of instances of how the past tense should be made seems to be stronger than the probably hundreds  of examples of how the past tense of "sit" should be made. 
 
Scott Woods

Johanna Rubba <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
We learn most of what we know about the world from induction, if that
is defined as extracting generalizations (rules) from experience. A
prime example is how vocabulary is learned: the vast majority of
words a child learns are learned inductively by observing the context
of use. But we learn so many things this way: I recently learned by
trial and error the "rule" of how many minutes it takes to ruin a raw
egg in the microwave. A child learns that a tower of blocks can go
only so high because very high ones keep toppling over.

But I have to admit the terminology confuses me. Sherlock Holmes
"deduced" many of his conclusions regarding crimes by extracting
information from evidence. Is this a different use of "deduce", or am
I just hopelessly confused about the whole issue?

Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel.: 805.756.2184
Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba

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