This introductory guide to language acquisition research is presented within the framework of Universal Grammar, a theory of the human faculty for language. The authors focus on two experimental techniques for assessing children's linguistic competence: the Elicited Production task, a production task, and the Truth Value Judgment task, a comprehension task. Their methodologies are designed to o…
This book brings together contributions by prominent researchers in the fields of language processing and language acquisition on topics of common interest: how people refer to objects in the world, how people comprehend such referential expressions, and how children acquire the ability to refer and to understand reference.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
A proposal that the syntactic structure of a sentence reporting a concrete episode in the world can be interpreted as a description of the sensorimotor processes involved in experiencing that episode.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
Revised papers presented at a series of lectures, during the 1986-87 academic year. Organized by the Program for Developmental Research, University of Maryland, College Park."A Bradford book."Errata slip inserted.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
A human-inspired, linguistically sophisticated model of language understanding for intelligent agent systems. One of the original goals of artificial intelligence research was to endow intelligent agents with human-level natural language capabilities. Recent AI research, however, has focused on applying statistical and machine learning approaches to big data rather than attempting to model w…
"We are born crying, but those cries signal the first stirring of language. Within a year or so, infants master the sound system of their language; a few years after that, they are engaging in conversations. This remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire any human language--'the language faculty'--raises important biological questions about language, including how it has evolved. This boo…
An argument that agreement and agreementless languages are unified under an expanded view of grammatical features including both phi-features and certain discourse configurational features.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
A book that uses domain-general learning theory to explain recurrent trajectories of language change. In this book, Vsevolod Kapatsinski argues that language acquisition -- often approached as an isolated domain, subject to its own laws and mechanisms -- is simply learning, subject to the same laws as learning in other domains and well described by associative models. Synthesizing research in d…
The intersecting worlds of Zellig Harris, Noam Chomsky's intellectual and political mentor. In 1995, Robert Barsky met with Noam Chomsky to discuss hiswork-in-progress, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent (MIT Press, 1997). Chomsky told Barsky that he shouldfocus his attention instead on midcentury linguist and activist Zellig Harris, who was, Chomsky modestly insisted, more interesting than Cho…
This is the first experimental study of Principle B with verb phrase ellipsis and properties of the interpretation of empty pronouns in ellipsis. Among the universal principles are those known as the principles of the binding theory. These principles constrain the range of interpretations that can be assigned to sentences containing reflexives and reciprocals, pronouns, and referring express…