Competition model

The Competition Model is a psycholinguistic theory of language acquisition and sentence processing developed by Elizabeth Bates and Brian MacWhinney. The Competition Model posits that the meaning of language is interpreted by comparing a number of linguistic cues within a sentence, and that language is learned through the competition of basic cognitive mechanisms in the presence of a rich linguistic environment. It is an emergentist theory of language acquisition and processing, serving as an alternative to strict nativist and empiricist theories. According to the Competition Model, competitive cognitive processes operate on a phylogenetic scale, an ontogenetic scale, and a 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 posits that people interpret the meaning of a sentence by taking into account various linguistic cues contained in the sentence context, such as word order, morphology, and semantic characteristics (e.g., animacy), to compute a probabilistic value for each interpretation, 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. Because different languages use different cues to signal meanings, the Competition Model maintains that cue weights will differ between languages, and users of a given language will use the cue weights associated with that language to guide their interpretation of sentences. Thus, when people learn multiple languages, they must learn which cues are important in which languages in order to successfully interpret sentences in any one language.

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