Language Processing as a Usage-Based Skill

The multiple-cue integration perspective on language acquisition highlights the rich nature of the input. In combination with the emphasis on cultural evolution of language, this points to a usage-based account of language processing in which linguistic experience plays a crucial role in determining language ability. In the final lecture, I therefore discuss the importance of experience for understanding language processing, focusing on the processing of relative clauses as an example. Evidence is presented from corpus analyses and on-line sentence processing experiments, showing that variations in the distribution of different relative clause types are directly reflected in the ease with which adults process such constructions. I propose that differences in relative clause processing may further emerge due to variations across individuals in their experience with language. Predictions from this account are supported by studies manipulating language exposure in both connectionist networks and human subjects. Additional experimental data suggest that individual differences in basic abilities for sequential learning and processing, in turn, may affect individuals’ ability to learn from experience. I conclude that the processing of relative clauses and of sentences, more generally, may be best construed as a usage-based skill, relying on the integration of multiple constraints.