knowledge of marble bag composition has been triggered by many individual examples of marble bags. More interestingly, this learner was able to have certain expectations about a marble bag containing a novel marble color by learning from bags containing only black or white marbles. Translating this to a linguistic example, suppose the marble bags are individual sentences. Some sentences contain...

Children are exposed to speech and other environmental evidence, from which they learn language. How do they do this? More specifically, how do children map from complex, physical signals to grammars that enable them to generate and interpret new utterances from their language? This thesis presents a computational theory of unsupervised language acquisition. By computational we mean that the th...

Morphology is language specific and must be acquired on the basis of particular linguistic data. This chapter addresses three central issues for the understanding of morphological acquisition: the distributional properties of morphology, the mechanisms of learning from data, and the developmental patterns and trajectories in child language. First, corpus studies of child directed language revea...

Bilingualism is a fascinating area of study with the potential to contribute much to the understanding of language learning, production, comprehension and processing. Nuria Sebastian-Galles’ paper [this issue] provides some interesting evidence on the early speech perception of bilingual language acquisition. I first make some comments on the data she presents before moving on to a somewhat bro...

Mechanisms of language acquisition have mostly been studied in isolation. Here, we review behavioral and imaging evidence concerning the role and the operation of three such mechanisms: statistical learning, rule extraction and perceptual primitives. Statistical learning is a general learning mechanism, found in animals, adults and infants, that tracks the distributional and statistical informa...

Speaking a second language (L2) means having acquired a new inventory of phonemes (speech sounds), new words, and new inflectional and syntactic rules. Because this new knowledge must be stored somewhere in the brain, it does not require neuroimaging experiments to conclude that a bilingual speaker’s brain must be in some way different from that of a monolingual speaker. The question is rather:...

Chomsky (1965; 1986) has long stressed the significance of the fact that children can acquire any human language. This linguistic phenomenon is a central motivation in the search for language universals. The claims of generative grammar underline the importance of documenting the full range of language diversity while typologically distinct languages still exist. Such documentation is necessary...