Competition model

The competition model is a psycholinguistic theory of language acquisition and sentence processing, developed by Elizabeth Bates and Brian MacWhinney (1981). The competition model is a psycholinguistic theory of language acquisition and sentence processing, developed by Elizabeth Bates and Brian MacWhinney (1981). The model suggests that the meaning of language is interpreted by comparing a number of linguistic 'cues' (signaling specific functions) within a sentence, and that language is learned through the competition of basic cognitive mechanisms inside a rich linguistic environment. It is an emergentist theory of language acquisition and processing, serving as an alternative to strict innatist and empiricist theories. According to the competition model, competitive cognitive processes operate on a phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and synchronic scale, allowing language acquisition to take place across a wide variety of chronological periods. In its original instantiation, the competition model was proposed as a theory of cross-linguistic sentence processing. The competition model suggests that people interpret the meaning of a sentence by taking into account various linguistic cues contained in the sentence context ('cotext'), such as word order, morphology, and semantic characteristics (e.g., animacy), to compute a probabilistic value for each interpretation, eventually choosing the interpretation with the highest likelihood. According to the model, cue weights are learned inductively on the basis of a 'constrained set of sentence types' and 'limited predictions of sentence meaning' for each language.