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Review Article
INTRODUCTION
Frequency effects are ubiquitous in virtually every domain of human cognition and behaviour, from the perception of facial attractiveness (Grammer & Thornhill, 1994) and the processing of musical structure (Temperley, 2007) to language change (Bybee, 2010) and adult sentence processing (Ellis, 2002). Our goal in this target article is to argue that frequency effects are ubiquitous also in children's first language acquisition, and to summarize the different types of frequency effect that are observed across all of its subdomains. We argue, very simply, that frequency effects constitute a phenomenon for which any successful theory must account. Such a theory might be a generativist/nativist account, under which children have innate knowledge of abstract categories, but are sensitive to the frequency with which exemplars of these categories are present in the input (e.g. see Yang, 2004, for a review). It could equally be a constructivist/usage-based account, under which children build up abstract constructions on the basis of the input, with the aid of little or no innate linguistic knowledge (e.g. Tomasello, 2003). Regardless of whatever other theoretical assumptions are made, any successful account of language acquisition will need to incorporate frequency-sensitive learning mechanisms.
It is important, at the outset, to clarify our claim. We do not argue that sensitivity to input frequency must be the defining feature, or even the most important feature, of a successful account of acquisition (i.e. we do not argue for a frequency-driven or frequency-based mechanism). It is not difficult to think of factors that are more important than input frequency in at least some scenarios. For example, if we consider the straightforward token frequency of lexical items, there is every reason to believe that children will make more effort to store low-frequency input strings that can be used to obtain desired objects (e.g. cake) than higher-frequency strings that cannot (e.g. the). We argue, instead, for a learning mechanism that is minimally frequency sensitive, under which input frequency need not be the chief determinant of acquisition in all cases.
It is also important to make clear that a frequency-sensitive learning mechanism need not (and most probably does not) entail a mechanism that "computes and matches the frequency of various elements in the...