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Author: Nick Chater
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191053589
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 269
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Book Description
This interdisciplinary new work explores one of the central theoretical problems in linguistics: learnability. The authors, from different backgrounds—-linguistics, philosophy, computer science, psychology and cognitive science-explore the idea that language acquisition proceeds through general purpose learning mechanisms, an approach that is broadly empiricist both methodologically and psychologically. For many years, the empiricist approach has been taken to be unfeasible on practical and theoretical grounds. In the book, the authors present a variety of precisely specified mathematical and computational results that show that empiricist approaches can form a viable solution to the problem of language acquisition. It assumes limited technical background and explains the fundamental principles of probability, grammatical description and learning theory in an accessible and non-technical way. Different chapters address the problem of language acquisition using different assumptions: looking at the methodology of linguistic analysis using simplicity based criteria, using computational experiments on real corpora, using theoretical analysis using probabilistic learning theory, and looking at the computational problems involved in learning richly structured grammars. Written by four researchers in the full range of relevant fields: linguistics (John Goldsmith), psychology (Nick Chater), computer science (Alex Clark), and cognitive science (Amy Perfors), the book sheds light on the central problems of learnability and language, and traces their implications for key questions of theoretical linguistics and the study of language acquisition.
Author: Nick Chater
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191053589
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 269
Get Book Here
Book Description
This interdisciplinary new work explores one of the central theoretical problems in linguistics: learnability. The authors, from different backgrounds—-linguistics, philosophy, computer science, psychology and cognitive science-explore the idea that language acquisition proceeds through general purpose learning mechanisms, an approach that is broadly empiricist both methodologically and psychologically. For many years, the empiricist approach has been taken to be unfeasible on practical and theoretical grounds. In the book, the authors present a variety of precisely specified mathematical and computational results that show that empiricist approaches can form a viable solution to the problem of language acquisition. It assumes limited technical background and explains the fundamental principles of probability, grammatical description and learning theory in an accessible and non-technical way. Different chapters address the problem of language acquisition using different assumptions: looking at the methodology of linguistic analysis using simplicity based criteria, using computational experiments on real corpora, using theoretical analysis using probabilistic learning theory, and looking at the computational problems involved in learning richly structured grammars. Written by four researchers in the full range of relevant fields: linguistics (John Goldsmith), psychology (Nick Chater), computer science (Alex Clark), and cognitive science (Amy Perfors), the book sheds light on the central problems of learnability and language, and traces their implications for key questions of theoretical linguistics and the study of language acquisition.
Author: Nick Chater
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198734263
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 269
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Book Description
This book explores one of the central theoretical problems in linguistics: learnability. Written by four researchers in linguistics, psychology, computer science, and cognitive science, it sheds light on the problems of learnability and language, and their implications for key theoretical linguistics and the study of language acquisition.
Author: Nick Chater
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191801891
Category : Cognitive psychology
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
This work explores one of the central theoretical problems in linguistics: learnability. Written by four researchers in linguistics, psychology, computer science, and cognitive science, it sheds light on the problems of learnability and language, and their implications for key theoretical linguistics and the study of language acquisition.
Author: Yvonne Bogataj
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638359956
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 27
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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject Speech Science / Linguistics, grade: 1 (sehr gut), University of Marburg, course: Psycholinguistics, language: English, abstract: Introduction How do children acquire language? As Susan H. Foster-Cohen put it in her book An Introduction to Child Language Development, most parents would reply either that they taught their children how to speak or that their children learned language “from hearing it and from being spoken to” (Foster-Cohen 1999: 95). This statement brings along further questions: Are children really dependent on input from their environment? If they are, when do they need to get what amount of input? And, more specifically, what sort of input do they need? There is a huge amount of different theories regarding children’s first language acquisition and the most important ones will be depicted in my term paper. At first, we will get a general overview on the different phases or stages a child goes through during language acquisition. Then, we will see some strange or “secret” phenomena, which bring along the question whether children only learn language by imitation as stated above by several parents, or if there might be an innate knowledge about how language could look like. We will then differentiate between the empiricist and rationalist positions that were represented by Locke and Descartes in the 17th/18th century. These positions have been examined and developed since then and will lead us to take a closer look at more modern theories. Piaget’s constructivist theory as well as Chomsky’s innateness hypothesis will be depicted and discussed in my term paper. Finally, we will see an example that demonstrates the important problem of the time limit for language acquisition. We will finally discuss whether this problem is contradictory to Chomsky’s innateness hypothesis.
Author: Brian MacWhinney
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1135676925
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 519
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Book Description
For nearly four centuries, our understanding of human development has been controlled by the debate between nativism and empiricism. Nowhere has the contrast between these apparent alternatives been sharper than in the study of language acquisition. However, as more is learned about the details of language learning, it is found that neither nativism nor empiricism provides guidance about the ways in which complexity arises from the interaction of simpler developmental forces. For example, the child's first guesses about word meanings arise from the interplay between parental guidance, the child's perceptual preferences, and neuronal support for information storage and retrieval. As soon as the shape of the child's lexicon emerges from these more basic forces, an exploration of "emergentism" as a new alternative to nativism and empiricism is ready to begin. This book presents a series of emergentist accounts of language acquisition. Each case shows how a few simple, basic processes give rise to new levels of language complexity. The aspects of language examined here include auditory representations, phonological and articulatory processes, lexical semantics, ambiguity processing, grammaticality judgment, and sentence comprehension. The approaches that are invoked to account formally for emergent patterns include neural network theory, dynamic systems, linguistic functionalism, construction grammar, optimality theory, and statistically-driven learning. The excitement of this work lies both in the discovery of new emergent patterns and in the integration of theoretical frameworks that can formalize the theory of emergentism.
Author: Nathan Stemmer
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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Book Description
Author: R.J. Matthews
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400909551
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
The impetus for this volume developed from the 1982 University of Western Ontario Learnability Workshop, which was organized by the editors and sponsored by that University's Department of Philosophy and the Centre for Cognitive Science. The volume e~plores the import of learnability theory for contemporary linguistic theory, focusing on foundational learning-theoretic issues associated with the parametrized Government-Binding (G-B) framework. Written by prominent re searchers in the field, all but two of the eight contributions are pre viously unpublished. The editor's introduction provides an overview that interrelates the separate papers and elucidates the foundational issues addressed by the volume. Osherson, Stob, and Weinstein's "Learning Theory and Natural Language" first appeared in Cognition (1984); Matthews's "The Plausi bility of Rationalism" was published in the Journal of Philosophy (1984). The editors would like to thank the publishers for permission to reprint these papers. Mr. Marin Marinov assisted with the preparation of the indices for the volume. VB ROBERT 1. MATTHEWS INTRODUCTION: LEARNABILITY AND LINGUISTIC THEORY 1. INTRODUCTION Formal learning theory, as the name suggests, studies the learnability of different classes of formal objects (languages, grammars, theories, etc.) under different formal models of learning. The specification of such a model, which specifies (a) a learning environment, (b) a learn ing strategy, and (c) a criterion for successful learning, determines (d) a class of formal objects, namely, the class that can be acquired to the level of the specified success criterion by a learner implementing the specified strategy in the specified enviroment.
Author: J. Archibald
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401120560
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
In this book Archibald describes two studies conducted within a parametric framework in the area of second language acquisition. The studies are designed to investigate the acquisition of English stress patterns (via both production and perception tasks) by adult speakers of Polish and Hungarian. Archibald argues that interlanguage grammars can be understood as a mix of L1 transfer and the effects of Universal Grammar. Metrical parameters related to such things as quantity--sensitivity, extrametricality, and word--tree dominance determine the structure of the interlanguage. The author reports that the subjects are remarkably successful at acquiring English stress and do not appear to violate proposed universals of metrical phonology. This book is one of the few attempts to investigate the acquisition of L2 phonology within a UG framework. Empirical support is provided for the parametric model to an extent uncommon in most syntactic studies.
Author: James Russell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780198530862
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 580
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Book Description
Language development is one of the major battle grounds within the humanities and sciences. This is the first time that the three major theories in language development research have been fully described and compared within the covers of a single book. The three approaches: (1) The rationalism of Chomsky and the syntactic nativism that it entails; (2)The empiricism instinct in connectionist modelling of syntactic development; (3) The pragmatism of those who see the child as actively constructing a grammatical inventory piece-by-piece through recruiting general learning abilities and socio-cognitive knowledge. The book is unique in striking a balance between broad philosophical assessment of these three theories and fine-grain, fairly technical, accounts of how they fare at the empirical and linguistic 'coal faces.' In Part I, the kind of psychology to which rationalism, empiricism, and pragmatism give rise are described with reference to philosophers such as Fodor, Hume, and the American pragmatists from Piece, to Rorty, and Brandom. After an introduction to the syntactic analysis of the sentence, Part 2 continues with an account of the evolution of Chomskyan theory from its inception to present day, followed by a review of developmental research inspired by it. Part 3 takes a sceptical look at connectionist modelling of syntactic development. Part 4 describes the kind of linguistic theories that the socio-cognitive approach find sympathetic, reviewing its empirical progress (e.g., the work of Tomasello), ending with a comparison of how the generativists and functionalists tackle the evolution of syntax. Clearly and accessibly written, the book will be an important text for the developmental psychologists, linguists, and philosophers working on language.
Author: Brian MacWhinney
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1410602362
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 519
Get Book Here
Book Description
For nearly four centuries, our understanding of human development has been controlled by the debate between nativism and empiricism. Nowhere has the contrast between these apparent alternatives been sharper than in the study of language acquisition. However, as more is learned about the details of language learning, it is found that neither nativism nor empiricism provides guidance about the ways in which complexity arises from the interaction of simpler developmental forces. For example, the child's first guesses about word meanings arise from the interplay between parental guidance, the child's perceptual preferences, and neuronal support for information storage and retrieval. As soon as the shape of the child's lexicon emerges from these more basic forces, an exploration of "emergentism" as a new alternative to nativism and empiricism is ready to begin. This book presents a series of emergentist accounts of language acquisition. Each case shows how a few simple, basic processes give rise to new levels of language complexity. The aspects of language examined here include auditory representations, phonological and articulatory processes, lexical semantics, ambiguity processing, grammaticality judgment, and sentence comprehension. The approaches that are invoked to account formally for emergent patterns include neural network theory, dynamic systems, linguistic functionalism, construction grammar, optimality theory, and statistically-driven learning. The excitement of this work lies both in the discovery of new emergent patterns and in the integration of theoretical frameworks that can formalize the theory of emergentism.
