This special issue focuses on evidence bearing on the specific ways in which linguistic differences across languages may affect what is learned early (or late) in language and to what extent language-specific structures interact with cognition. The ultimate question is whether or not development follows a universal course or is influenced by the linguistic system being acquired. Of particular i...

We describe a new formalism for storing linguistic data in a text to speech system. Linguistic entities such as words and phones are stored as feature structures in a general object called an linguistic item. Items are configurable at run time and via the feature structure can contain arbitrary information. Linguistic relations are used to store the relationship between items of the same lingui...

A major theoretical debate in language acquisition research regards the learnability of hierarchical structures. The artificial grammar learning methodology is increasingly influential in approaching this question. Studies using an artificial centre-embedded A(n)B(n) grammar without semantics draw conflicting conclusions. This study investigates the facilitating effect of distributional biases ...

Image schemas provide preverbal conceptual structures and are suggested to be the conceptual building blocks from which cognitive phenomena such as language and reasoning are constructed. ‘Motion along a path’ is one of the first image schemas infants remember, making PATH-following one of the earliest cognitive building blocks. We are interested in the importance of this developmentally releva...

This article shows that the complex structure of the high-tech production complex, as well as the great quantity of research, technical, production, financial and economic processes therein complicate the analysis and assessment of its development by means of traditional approaches and modeling methods. Numerous experiments focusing on formalization of weakly structured phenomena, objects, situ...