Metalinguistic processing and acquisition within the MOGUL framework

MOGUL (Modular On-line Growth and Use of Language) is a framework that builds on Jackendoff’s views about the language faculty. Jackendoff’s approach not only has ‘psychological’ reality in that it claims to account for linguistic knowledge in the individual and the logical problem of language acquisition, it also has what might be called ‘psycholinguistic’ reality making claims about on-line language processing as well.This aspect is exploited in MOGUL’s account of language acquisition and performance and, amongst other things, permits explicit accounts of metalinguistic ability, here claimed to be a mental system developed and operated largely outside the modular language system and resulting in a different type of grammatical knowledge, one which complements and also conflicts with intuitively cognised grammar to which we have no conscious access.