Synopses & Reviews
This book presents recent advances by leading researchers in computational modelling of language acquisition. The contributors have been drawn from departments of linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, and computer science. They show what light can be thrown on fundamental problems when powerful computational techniques are combined with real data. The book considers the extent to which linguistic structure is readily available in the environment, the degree to which language learning is inductive or deductive, and the power of different modelling formalisms for different problems and approaches. It will appeal to linguists, psychologists, cognitive scientists working in language acquisition,and to those involved in computational modelling in linguistic and behavioral science.
About the Author
Peter Broeder is Assistant Professor at Tilburg University where his research involves unravelling processes of language change among ethnic minority groups.
Jaap Murre is a Research Fellow in the Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam. Previously he worked as a scientist at the Applied Psychology Unit of the Medical Research Council in Cambridge. Dr. Murre also heads a research group sponsored by a PIONIER grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction,
Peter Broeder and Jaap MurrePart I: Words
Chapter 2: Lexicalist Connectionism, Brian MacWhinney
Chapter 3: Are SRNs Sufficient for Modelling Language Acquisition?, Noel Sharkey, Amanda Sharkey, and Stuart Jackson
Chapter 4: A Distributed, Yet Symbolic Model for Text-to-Speech Processing, Antal van den Bosch and Walter Daelemans
Chapter 5: "Lazy Learning": A Comparison of Natural and Machine Learning of Word Stress, Steven Gillis, Walter Daelemans, and Gert Durieux
Part II: Word Formation
Chapter 6: Statistical and Connectionist Modelling of the Development of Speech Segmentation, Richard Shillcock, Paul Cairns, Nick Chater, and Joe Levy
Chapter 7: Learning Word-to-Meaning Mappings, Jeffrey Mark Siskind
Chapter 8: Children's Overregularization and its Implication for Cognition, Gary Marcus
Chapter 9: The Performance of a Recurrent Network with Short Term Memory Capacity Learning the German -S Plural, Rainer Goebel and Peter Indefrey
Chapter 19: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison of Single and Dual-Route Models of Inflectional Morphology, Ramin Nakisa, Kim Plunkett, and Ulrike Hahn
Part III: Word Order
Chapter 11: Formal Models for Learning in the Principles and Parameters Framework, Partha Nyogi and Robert C. Berwick
Chapter 12: An Output-as-Input Hypothesis for Language Acquisition: Arguments, Model, Evidence, Loeki Elbers