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Author: Stefano Bertolo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521646208
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
Language Acquisition and Learnability is an accessible introduction to learnability theory and its interactions with linguistic theories. Working within the Principles and Parameters framework, the book surveys general concepts from formal learning theory and complexity theory, together with important findings from developmental psycholinguistics, historical linguistics and language processing. Written by a team of leading researchers it examines important techniques that can be used to obtain interesting and empirically testable predictions from parametric theories of language variation and includes chapters on syntax, diachronic syntax and the relationship between linguistic complexity and the form of parameters. Fully integrated, and complete with a large number of exercises to test readers on their understanding of the material, this book will become essential reading for students and researchers in linguistic theory.
Author: Stefano Bertolo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521646208
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Get Book Here
Book Description
Language Acquisition and Learnability is an accessible introduction to learnability theory and its interactions with linguistic theories. Working within the Principles and Parameters framework, the book surveys general concepts from formal learning theory and complexity theory, together with important findings from developmental psycholinguistics, historical linguistics and language processing. Written by a team of leading researchers it examines important techniques that can be used to obtain interesting and empirically testable predictions from parametric theories of language variation and includes chapters on syntax, diachronic syntax and the relationship between linguistic complexity and the form of parameters. Fully integrated, and complete with a large number of exercises to test readers on their understanding of the material, this book will become essential reading for students and researchers in linguistic theory.
Author: Bruce Tesar
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262264884
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 158
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Book Description
Highlighting the close relationship between linguistic explanation and learnability, Bruce Tesar and Paul Smolensky examine the implications of Optimality Theory (OT) for language learnability. Highlighting the close relationship between linguistic explanation and learnability, Bruce Tesar and Paul Smolensky examine the implications of Optimality Theory (OT) for language learnability. They show how the core principles of OT lead to the learning principle of constraint demotion, the basis for a family of algorithms that infer constraint rankings from linguistic forms. Of primary concern to the authors are the ambiguity of the data received by the learner and the resulting interdependence of the core grammar and the structural analysis of overt linguistic forms. The authors argue that iterative approaches to interdependencies, inspired by work in statistical learning theory, can be successfully adapted to address the interdependencies of language learning. Both OT and Constraint Demotion play critical roles in their adaptation. The authors support their findings both formally and through simulations. They also illustrate how their approach could be extended to other language learning issues, including subset relations and the learning of phonological underlying forms.
Author: Alan Juffs
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027224781
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
This book provides a critical review of recent theories of semantics-syntax correspondences and makes new proposals for constraints on semantic structure relevant to syntax. Data from several languages are presented which suggest that semantic structure in root morphemes is subject to parametric variation which has effect across a variety of verb classes, including locatives, unaccusatives, and psych verbs.The implications for first and second language acquisition are discussed. In particular, it is suggested that different parametric settings may lead to a learnability problem if adult learners do not retain access to sensitivity to underlying semantic organization and morphological differences between languages provided by Universal Grammar.An experiment with Chinese-speaking learners of English is presented which shows that learners initially transfer L1 semantic organization to the L2, but are able to retreat from overgeneralisations and achieve native-like grammars in this area.Suggestions for further research in this rapidly developing area of theory and acquisition research are also made.
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: Steven Pinker
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262314282
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 509
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Book Description
A classic book about language acquisition and conceptual structure, with a new preface by the author, "The Secret Life of Verbs." Before Steven Pinker wrote bestsellers on language and human nature, he wrote several technical monographs on language acquisition that have become classics in cognitive science. Learnability and Cognition, first published in 1989, brought together two big topics: how do children learn their mother tongue, and how does the mind represent basic categories of meaning such as space, time, causality, agency, and goals? The stage for this synthesis was set by the fact that when children learn a language, they come to make surprisingly subtle distinctions: pour water into the glass and fill the glass with water sound natural, but pour the glass with water and fill water into the glass sound odd. How can this happen, given that children are not reliably corrected for uttering odd sentences, and they don't just parrot back the correct ones they hear from their parents? Pinker resolves this paradox with a theory of how children acquire the meaning and uses of verbs, and explores that theory's implications for language, thought, and the relationship between them. As Pinker writes in a new preface, "The Secret Life of Verbs," the phenomena and ideas he explored in this book inspired his 2007 bestseller The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. These technical discussions, he notes, provide insight not just into language acquisition but into literary metaphor, scientific understanding, political discourse, and even the conceptions of sexuality that go into obscenity.
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: Virginia Yip
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027224773
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
This book investigates a set of structures characteristic of Chinese speakers' English interlanguage (CIL) in the light of grammatical theory and principles of learnability. As a study of CIL grammar, it illuminates both the theory of interlanguage syntax in general and some specific problems in the acquisition of English by Chinese L1 learners. A set of interrelated structures are investigated, including topicalization, passive, ergative, “tough movement” and existential constructions. The interlanguage is approached through the comparative syntax of the relevant L1 and L2 constructions, combining insights from Chomskyan Universal Grammar and typological research. CIL proves to be permeable to Chinese typological influence and bears topic-prominent characteristics, while showing effects of language universals. A parallel theme of the book is the question of learnability in the context of second language acquisition. The Subset and Uniqueness Principles are adapted to the L2 context so as to account for learning difficulty as well as successful acquisition. Under-generation and over-generation of the interlanguage and target constructions give rise to learnability problems which are formulated in terms of set relations at the level of individual constructions. The Uniqueness Principle is invoked to motivate preemption of overgenerated forms. The interaction of syntax and semantics plays a crucial role in the formulation and resolution of these learnability problems. General conceptual issues raised by the Subset and Uniqueness Principles are also discussed.
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: Thomas Roeper
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 940093727X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
In May 1985 the University of Massachusetts held the first conference on the parameter setting model of grammar and acquisition. The conference was conceived in the belief that there is a new possibility of tightly connecting grammatical studies and language acquisition studies, and that this new possibility has grown out of the new generation of ideas about the relation of Universal Grammar to the grammar of particular languages. The papers in this volume are all concerned in one way or another with the 'parametric' model of grammar, and with its role in explaining the acquisition of language. Before summarizing the accompanying papers, I would like to sketch the intellectual background of these new ideas. It has long been the acknowledged goal of grammatical theorists to explicate the relation between the experience of the child and the knowledge of the adult. Somehow, the child selects a unique grammar (by assumption) compatible with a random partially unreliable sample of some language. In the earliest work in generative grammar, starting with Chomsky's Aspects, and extending to such works as Jackendoffs Lexicalist Syntax (1977), the model of this account was the formal evaluation metric, accompanied by a general rule writing system. The model of acquisition was the following: the child composed a grammar by writing rules in the rule writing system, under the constraint that the rules must be compatible with the data, and that the grammar must be the one most highly valued by the evaluation metric.
Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674042174
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 474
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Book Description
In this influential study, Steven Pinker develops a new approach to the problem of language learning. Now reprinted with new commentary by the author, this classic work continues to be an indispensable resource in developmental psycholinguistics.
