Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children exposed to inconsistent language variation regularize this variation in their productions (Hudson-Kam &Newport, 2005). Existing demonstrations of regularization observe this behavior when the signal-to-noise ratio is greater-than-or-equal-to 40%, but whether regularization occurs when the dominant form is less widespread has not been investigated. Arecent computational model, the Sufficiency Principle, quantifies when a pattern is widespread enough to generalize (Yang,2016): Let R be a generalization over N items, of which M are attested to follow R. R extends to all N items iff: N-M