Abstract

Christiansen & Chater (C&C) focus solely on general-purpose cognitive processes in their elegant conceptualization of language evolution. However, numerous developmental facts attested in L1 acquisition confound C&C's subsequent claim that the logical problem of language acquisition now plausibly recapitulates that of language evolution. I argue that language acquisition should be viewed instead as a multi-layered construction involving the interplay of general and domain-specific learning mechanisms