A unified explanation for production/comprehension asymmetries

In the past decades, research on language acquisition has identified several asymmetries between production and comprehension in various languages and in various areas of language. Many of these asymmetries came as a surprise to their investigators, because no asymmetries are expected under the traditional view of the grammar as a direction-insensitive system of rules. The aim of this paper is to show that viewing the grammar as a direction-sensitive system of constraints on form and meaning allows for a unified linguistic explanation of various types of production/comprehension asymmetries in language acquisition.

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