@inproceedings{616,
  author = {Alexia Hernandez and Sammy Floyd and Adele Goldberg},
  title = {Productivity depends on communicative intention and accessibility, not thresholds},
  abstract = {<p>When do children extend a construction ({\textquotedblleft}rule{\textquotedblright}) productively? A recent Threshold proposal claims that a construction is productive if and only if it has been witnessed applying to a sufficient proportion of cases and sufficiently few exceptions. An alternative proposal, Communicate + Access (C\&amp;A), argues that children extend a construction productively because they wish to express an intended message and are unable to access a {\textquotedblleft}better{\textquotedblright} (appropriate and more conventional) way to do it. Accessibility, in turn, is negatively affected by interference from competing alternatives. In a (preregistered) experiment, 32 4-6-year-old children were provided with exposure to 2 mini-artificial languages for which the two proposals make opposite predictions. Results support the C\&amp;A proposal: children were more productive after witnessing 3 rule-following cases than after 5, due to differences in interference. We conclude that productivity is encouraged by a desire to communicate a message and is constrained by accessibility/interference.</p>},
  year = {2019},
  journal = {PICSS},
  volume = {1},
}