The Competition Model
The CM (MacWhinney, 2005a) is an emergentist theory of language acquisition. The emergentist approach holds that a particular phenomenon is not the result of any one specific factor, but rather is a product of multiple factors interacting with one another (MacWhinney, 2005b).
….
The CM originally was proposed as a theory of sentence processing that focused on how the available cues in a language are utilized during sentence interpretation (Bates & MacWhinney, 1989). These cues refer to various features within a language, as well as their meanings and relationships to one another. Examples of these cues include verb agreement, animacy, case marking, and word order (these cues will be described in greater detail later).
According to the CM, successful language acquisition depends upon the ability of speakers to choose the appropriate “victor” out of all available cues in order to determine the correct interpretation of statements. In the laboratory, speakers’ cue interpretation strategies have traditionally been examined using the actor-assignment task. In this task, participants are given a sentence consisting of a transitive verb and two nouns. Participants are asked to choose which of the two nouns fulfills the semantic role of actor (the noun that performs the action in the sentence). For example, participants may see a sentence such as:
*The rocks eats the zebra.
Participants then choose between either the rocks or the zebra as the actor of the sentence. To speakers of English, which possess a subject-verb-object word order, the word order cue favors the noun phrase the rocks.
However, the cue of verb agreement favors the zebra, as English grammar dictates that the –s suffix on the verb eat requires a third-person singular noun.
The cue of animacy also favors the zebra, as it is more likely for a living creature to instigate an action than it is for an inanimate object to do so. Thus, in this example, we see a case in which there are conflicting cues.
English speakers, when confronted with such conflict, tend to utilize the cue of word order over others, and interpret the pre-verbal noun as being the actor and the post-verbal noun as being the object (i.e. the rocks) (MacWhinney, Bates, & Kliegl, 1984; MacWhinney, 2005a). This indicates that word order is a stronger cue than either verb agreement or animacy for native English speakers.
By analyzing participants’ pattern of responses, particularly to sentences that possess various configurations of conflicting cues (such as above), the intrinsic cue hierarchies of a given language can be understood.