ABSTRACT
An overgeneral grammar generates all the well-formed sentences of a language but also generates sentences that native speakers do not consider well-formed. That is, it is possible to have two grammars both of which generate the well-formed sentences, and which differ only in that one of them--the overgeneral grammar-also generates strings that are not grammatical to native speaker intuition. We face the following problem (Baker, 1979; Braine, 1971): Given that every sentence a child hears is consistent with both grammars, how does the child eventually settle on the correct grammar and not on the overgeneral grammar? The problem is particularly acute because the overgeneral grammar is usually intuitively simpler than the correct one. Moreover, young children are known to make errors consistent with overgeneral grammars.
