Theories of grammatical development differ in how much abstract knowledge they attribute to young children. Here, we report a series of experiments using a computational model to evaluate the explanatory power of child grammars based not on abstract rules but on concrete words and phrases and some local abstractions associated with these words and phrases. We use a Bayesian procedure to extract...

Title of dissertation: A PROGRAM FOR EXPERIMENTAL SYNTAX: FINDING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ACCEPTABILITY AND GRAMMATICAL KNOWLEDGE Jon Sprouse Doctor of Philosophy, 2007 Dissertation directed by: Professor Howard Lasnik Department of Linguistics There has always been interest in the methodology of acceptability judgment collection, as well as the reliability of the results. It seems, though, th...

This paper describes the Omphalos Context-Free Grammar Learning Competition held as part of the International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference 2004. The competition was created in an effort to promote the development of new and better grammatical inference algorithms for context-free languages, to provide a forum for the comparison of different grammatical inference algorithms and to gain in...

The authors present the results of a 2-year longitudinal study of 90 British children beginning at school entry when they were 4 years 9 months old (range = 4 years 2 months to 5 years 2 months). The relationships among early phonological skills, letter knowledge, grammatical skills, and vocabulary knowledge were investigated as predictors of word recognition and reading comprehension. Word rec...

It has been known that people, after being exposed to sentences generated by an artificial grammar, acquire implicit grammatical knowledge and are able to transfer the knowledge to inputs that are generated by a modified grammar. We show that a second order recurrent neural network is able to transfer grammatical knowledge from one language (generated by a Finite State Machine) to another langu...

Theories of natural language syntax often characterize grammatical knowledge as a form of abstract computation. This paper argues that such a characterization is correct, and that fundamental properties of grammar can and should be understood in terms of restrictions on the complexity of possible grammatical computation, when defined in terms of generative capacity. More specifically, the paper...

Grammar teaching has been a topic of debate for considerably long time. Researchers and teachers discussed the benefits shortcomings its explicit instruction, which entails students’ awareness metalanguage. Although much research investigated metalanguage, effect on improving grammatical accuracy is still an unresolved issue, concerning it relatively limited. Nevertheless, widely recognised tha...

This paper proposes a knowledge-based approach to manage software warehouses. It is understood that knowledge acquisition is the bottleneck for intelligent systems of all kinds. Our research focuses on solutions for both theoretical and practical aspects of the bottleneck tasks through the proposed mechanisms of randomization, symbolic representation, and grammatical inference. Key-Words: Knowl...