Competition Model

The competition model is a psycholinguistic theory of language acquisition and sentence processing developed by Elizabeth Bates and Brian MacWhinney in 1982. It proposes that the forms of natural languages are created, governed, constrained, acquired and used in the service of communicative functions, and that language processing works through competition among these functions for expression. The model is an emergentist account of language acquisition and processing, offered as an alternative to both strict innatist theories, which locate language ability in dedicated inborn structures, and strict empiricist theories, which treat language as learned purely from exposure. Under the model, patterns in language arise from a Darwinian-style process of competition and selection operating across several timescales at once, including the evolutionary, the developmental, the socially diffused, and the moment-to-moment.