ON THE STUDY OF FIRST LANGUAGE-ACQUISITION

We study the discovery problem by developmental psycholinguists, namel y, to characterize learning mechanism deployed in first language acqui sition. Within our model, the psycholinguist has access to the graph o f the function that maps children's linguistic data to their grammatic al hypotheses. They must converge in the limit to an adequate theory o f the child, in a weak sense of ''adequate.'' It is shown that even st rong hypotheses about the learning strategy embodied by the child do n ot suffice to render solvable the psycholinguist's task. (C) 1995 Acad emic Press. Inc.