While there are always differences in children’s input, it is unclear how often these differences impact language development – that is, are developmentally meaningful – and why they do (or do not) do so. We describe a new approach using computational cognitive modeling that links children’s input to predicted language development outcomes, and can identify if input differences are potentially developmentally meaningful. We use this approach to investigate if there is developmentally-meaningful input variation across socio-economic status (SES) with respect to the complex syntactic knowledge called syntactic islands. We focus on four island types with available data about the target linguistic behavior. Despite several measurable input differences for syntactic island input across SES, our model predicts this variation not to be developmentally meaningful: it predicts no differences in the syntactic island knowledge that can be learned from that input. We discuss implications for language development variability across SES.

中文翻译：

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一种确定儿童输入的变化是否具有发展意义的新方法：使用计算认知模型评估句法孤岛的跨社会经济地位的输入

虽然儿童的输入总是存在差异，但尚不清楚这些差异影响语言发展的频率——也就是说，发展意义– 以及他们为什么这样做（或不这样做）。我们描述了一种使用计算认知模型的新方法，该模型将儿童的输入与预测的语言发展结果联系起来，并且可以确定输入差异是否具有潜在的发展意义。我们使用这种方法来调查关于称为句法孤岛的复杂句法知识，跨社会经济地位 (SES) 是否存在具有发展意义的输入变化。我们专注于四种岛屿类型，并提供有关目标语言行为的可用数据。尽管跨 SES 的句法岛输入有几个可测量的输入差异，但我们的模型预测这种变化在发展上没有意义：它预测可以从该输入中学习的句法岛知识没有差异。