ABSTRACT
A major goal of the Competition Model is the building of bridges between child language research and cognitive science in general. The Competition Model adopts a research strategy that relates language to general cognitive principles. In the Competition Model, the temporal positions of specific auditory properties are characterized by associating to each set of segmental properties a further set of positional properties. The core representational structure in the Competition Model is the lexical item, an association between external form and internal function. This chapter examines the level of function, where lexical representations are connected to a set of semantic properties. The processing principles of the model emphasize the ways in which lexical items compete with each other during comprehension and production. The learning principles of the model work to isolate lexical items and to shape connections between items and their properties on the basis of positive instances.
