Jeff meditates on memory in acquisition

In a special issue of TiCS honoring Lila Gleitman, Jeffrey Lidz offers "A Meditation" on learning, memory and syntactic bootstrapping.

In a special issue of TiCS honoring Lila Gleitman, A Meditation from Jeffrey Lidz on learning, memory and syntactic bootstrapping. The meditation begins with an apparent paradox: whereas work on syntactic bootstrapping depends on learners retaining information about the set of distributional contexts that a word occurs in, work on identifying a word’s referent suggests that learners do not retain information about the set of extralinguistic contexts that a word occurs in. In response Jeff argues that this asymmetry derives from the architecture of the language faculty. Learners expect words with similar meanings to have similar distributions, and so learning depends on a memory for syntactic environments. The referential context in which a word is used is less constrained and hence contributes less to the memories that drive word learning.