preemption

Avoiding overgeneralizations

This strand of work uses artificial language learning methods to explore different theories about how we children lean to avoid overgeneralization errors: When children learn their mother tongue, they sometimes make errors such as “he giggled me!”, “she fell me over!” or “carry me teddy”. Learning to avoid these mistakes in English (and many other languages of the world) involves learning that some verbs can appear in a two-person sentence (e.