Knowledge and learning in natural language

By Charles D. Yang. 2000

711 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The present dissertation is a study of language development in children. From a biological perspective, the development of language, as the development of any other organic systems, is an interaction between internal and external factors; specifically, between the child's internal knowledge of linguistic structures and the external linguistic experience he receives. Drawing insights from the study of biological evolution, we put forth a quantitative model of language acquisition that make this interaction precise, by embedding a theory of knowledge, the Universal Grammar, into a theory of learning from experience. In particular, we advance the idea that language acquisition should be modeled as a population of grammatical hypotheses, competing to match the external linguistic experiences, much like in a natural selection process. We present evidence—conceptual, mathematical, and empirical, and from a number of independent areas of linguistic research, including the acquisition of syntax and morphophology, and historical language change—to demonstrate the model's correctness and utility. (Copies available exclusively from MIT Libraries, Rm. 14-0551, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. Ph. 617-253-5668; Fax 617-253-1690.)

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/68fa8e18b91bf0de077bb14631dce913b739e9e0

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Citations in the corpus

On the role of locality in learning stress patterns* (2009, background): “This universal is established by examining the stress patterns contained in two recent typological studies, Bailey (1995) and Gordon (2002), and is interesting for at least three reasons.”
Cognitive Science in the era of Artificial Intelligence: A roadmap for reverse-engineering the infant language-learner (2016, neutral): “uage acquisition have proposed a number of ways to combine these criteria. To quote a few, MacWhinney (1978) proposed 9 criteria, Berwick (1985), 9 criteria (dierent ones), Pinker (1987) 6 criteria, Yang (2002) 3 criteria, M. C. Frank, Goldwater, Griths, and Tenenbaum (2010) 2 criteria. These can be”
Listen, Interact and Talk: Learning to Speak via Interaction (2017, methodology): “As for future work, we would like to explore the direction of explicit modeling of learned knowledge [Yang, 2003] and fast learning about new concepts [Andrychowicz et al., 2016].”
Morphosyntactic Learning and the Development of Tense (2007, background): “After all, the selection of grammars in learning requires a pool of candidates to select from, and that is supplied by parameters and UG (see Yang (2002; 2004) for additional discussions).”
Cognition (1999, neutral): “The experiment lasted roughly 3 min.”