Beyond the continuity assumption. Radical minimalism in children with SLI
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Abstract
Parallel to classical debates in the field of language acquisition, the question can be raised whether developmental language disorders are continuous in comparison to developmentally typical language. Matters are contentious, but what we suggest in this paper is a new perspective on the issue, namely, moving ‘beyond’ explanatory adequacy and dealing with the case from the standpoint of the ‘problem of design.’ This point of view leads us to the question whether developmentally atypical language still obeys the kinds of design optimization criteria that make language a quasi-perfect object. The analysis of a sample of experimentally gathered child SLI Spanish leads us to conclude that, indeed, optimization/third factor effects prevail over UG principles in their grammars.
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