Unifying Cross-linguistic and Within-language Patterns of Finiteness Marking in MOSAIC

MOSAIC, a model that has already simulated cross-linguistic differences in the occurrence of the Optional Infinitive phenomenon, is applied to the simulation of the pattern of finiteness marking within Dutch. This within-language pattern, which includes verb placement, low rates of Optional Infinitives in Wh-questions and the correlation between finiteness marking and subject provision, has been taken as evidence for the view that children have correctly set the clause structure and inflectional parameters for their language. MOSAIC, which employs no built-in linguistic knowledge, clearly simulates the pattern of results as a function of its utterance-final bias, the same mechanism that is responsible for its successful simulation of the cross-linguistic data. These results suggest that both the cross