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E. C. Tolman emphasized the purposiveness of behavior — the idea that much of our behavior is goal-directed. For instance, employees who aim for a promotion work diligently to meet their targets. Tolman argued that when classical conditioning and operant conditioning occur, the organism acquires certain expectations. In classical conditioning, a child might fear a dog because they expect it to bite. In operant conditioning, a person might consistently work overtime because they expect a bonus...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 15, 2026

Measuring Statistical Learning Across Modalities and Domains in School-Aged Children Via an Online Platform and Neuroimaging Techniques

Measuring Statistical Learning Across Modalities and Domains in School-Aged Children Via an Online Platform and Neuroimaging Techniques

Published on: June 30, 2020

Language learning from positive evidence, reconsidered: a simplicity-based approach.

Anne S Hsu¹, Nick Chater, Paul Vitányi

¹Department of Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences, University College London, UK. anne.hsu@ ucl.ac.uk

Topics in Cognitive Science

|January 22, 2013

Summary

Children can acquire language using only positive evidence, without needing error correction. This study shows that favoring the simplest linguistic encoding enables successful learning of grammar, production, and meaning.

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Last Updated: May 15, 2026

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Area of Science:

Linguistics
Cognitive Science
Computer Science

Background:

Children acquire native languages through environmental exposure, often without explicit error correction.
Learning from positive evidence alone presents a "logical problem" for language acquisition, as learners might overgeneralize grammatical rules.

Purpose of the Study:

To review formal results on language acquisition from positive evidence.
To demonstrate how the "simplest encoding" approach can resolve the logical problem in language learning.

Main Methods:

Review of recent formal results in computational linguistics and learnability theory.
Analysis of the "simplest encoding" principle as a solution to the positive evidence problem.

Main Results:

Formal results confirm that learners can successfully acquire language from positive evidence if the input favors the simplest encoding.
This approach explains the learnability of linguistic prediction, grammaticality judgments, language production, and form-meaning mappings.
The simplicity framework is scalable for analyzing specific linguistic constructions and empirically testable.

Conclusions:

Language acquisition from positive evidence is feasible when learners favor the simplest data encoding.
The simplicity principle provides a robust framework for understanding human language acquisition and can be empirically validated.