This paper describes the Omphalos Context-Free Language Learning Competition held as part of the International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference 2004. After the success of the Abbadingo Competition on the better known task of learning regular languages, the competition was created in an effort to promote the development of new and better grammatical inference algorithms for context-free langu...

It is desirable for an intelligent program to communicate with humans using a natural language. We have recently developed a program to parse a sentence into a thought using a learned English grammar. Without learning a separate grammar, this paper discusses how we convert the learned grammatical structures into role structures. These role structures can then be used by our algorithm to generat...

What kinds of knowledge underlie the use of language and how is this knowledge acquired? Linguists equate knowing a language with knowing a grammar. Classic "poverty of the stimulus" arguments suggest that grammar identification is an intractable inductive problem and that acquisition is possible only because children possess innate knowledge of grammatical structure. An alternative view is eme...

The present study addresses the issue of the distinction between nouns and verbs in the lexicon and investigates if and to what extent the grammatical properties of nouns and verbs play a role in organizing the lexical knowledge. Evidence from linguistics, cognitive psychology and cognitive neuropsychology of language is reviewed in order to support the conclusions that, among many other dimens...

The knowledge of grammatical categories such as nouns and verbs is considered to lie at the foundations of human language comprehension and production abilities. Words’ distributional and phonological properties contribute to both adult and infant learning of grammatical categories. Here we investigate the contribution of semantic cues to the acquisition of grammatical categories using grammati...

Language students are most engaged while reading texts at an appropriate difficulty level. However, existing methods of evaluating text difficulty focus mainly on vocabulary and do not prioritize grammatical features, hence they do not work well for language learners with limited knowledge of grammar. In this paper, we introduce grammatical templates, the expert-identified units of grammar that...

This study examined abstract syntactic categorization in infants, using the case of grammatical gender. Ninety-six French-learning 14-, 17-, 20-, and 30-month-olds completed the study. In a preferential looking procedure infants were tested on their generalized knowledge of grammatical gender involving pseudonouns and gender-marking determiners. The pseudonouns were controlled to contain no pho...

It is generally assumed that speakers of grammatical gender languages consider grammatical gender arbitrary, but this assumption has never been tested. Research shows that the grammatical gender of nouns can affect perceptions of the masculinity or femininity of the noun's referent in speakers of languages with masculine and feminine noun classes. However, bilingualism facilitates the developme...

The present study examined the acquisition of anaphora in English by Iranian EFL learners as well as Persian speaking children. To do so, the study was conducted in three phases. In the first phase, 40 intermediate female and male EFL learners were selected from Puyan Institute in Takestan, Iran. Then, an off-line based Grammatical Judgment Task was administered. In the second phase, 40 female ...