How do children learn to communicate, and what do they learn? Traditionally, most theories have taken an associative, compositional approach to these questions, supposing children acquire an inventory of form-meaning associations, and procedures for composing / decomposing them; into / from messages in production and comprehension. This paper presents an alternative account of human communication and its acquisition based on the systematic, discriminative approach embodied in psychological and computational models of learning, and formally described by communication theory. It describes how discriminative learning theory offers an alternative perspective on the way that systems of semantic cues are conditioned onto communicative codes, while information theory provides a very different view of the nature of the codes themselves. It shows how the distributional properties of languages satisfy the communicative requirements described in information theory, enabling language learners to align their expectations despite the vastly different levels of experience among language users, and to master communication systems far more abstract than linguistic intuitions traditionally assume. Topics reviewed include morphological development, the acquisition of verb argument structures, and the functions of linguistic systems that have proven to be stumbling blocks for compositional theories: grammatical gender and personal names.

中文翻译：

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孩子如何学会有区别地沟通

孩子们如何学习交流，他们学到了什么？传统上，大多数理论都对这些问题采取了关联的、组合的方法，假设儿童获得了形式-意义关联的清单，以及组合/分解它们的程序；进入/来自生产和理解中的消息。本文基于体现在学习的心理和计算模型中的系统性、辨别性方法，并由传播理论正式描述，提出了人类传播及其获取的另一种解释。它描述了判别学习理论如何为语义线索系统以交流代码为条件的方式提供另一种视角，而信息论则为代码本身的性质提供了一种截然不同的观点。它展示了语言的分布特性如何满足信息论中描述的交际要求，使语言学习者能够在语言用户的经验水平大不相同的情况下调整他们的期望，并掌握比语言直觉传统上假设的更抽象的交际系统。审查的主题包括形态发展、动词论元结构的获得，以及已被证明是构成理论绊​​脚石的语言系统的功能：语法性别和人名。并掌握比语言直觉传统上假设的更抽象的交流系统。审查的主题包括形态发展、动词论元结构的获得，以及已被证明是构成理论绊​​脚石的语言系统的功能：语法性别和人名。并掌握比语言直觉传统上假设的更抽象的交流系统。审查的主题包括形态发展、动词论元结构的获得，以及已被证明是构成理论绊​​脚石的语言系统的功能：语法性别和人名。