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Formal Models of Language Learning
Abstract
Research is reviewed that addresses itself to human language learning by developing precise, mechanistic models that are capable in principle of acquiring languages on the basis of exposure to linguistic data. Such research includes theorems on language learnability from mathematical linguistics, computer models of language acquisition from cognitive simulation and artificial intelligence, and models of transformational grammar acquisition from theoretical linguistics. It is argued that such research bears strongly on major issues in developmental psycholinguistics, in particular, nativism and empiricism, the role of semantics and pragmatics in language learning, cognitive development, and the importance of the simplified speech addressed to children.RésuméAnalyse d'une recherche centrée sur l'apprentissage du langage humain, développant des modéles mécanistes précis susceptibles, en principe, d'acquérir le langage à partir d'une exposition aux données linguistiques. Une telle recherche comporte des théorémes (empruntés à la linguistique mathématique) des modéles informatiques pour l'acquisition du langage (empruntés à la simulation cognitive et à l'intelligence artificielle) des modéles d'acquisition de la grammaire transformationnelle (empruntés à la linguistique théorique). On soutient que cette recherche repose étroitement sur les thèmes principaux de la psycholinguistique de développement et en particulier sur l'opposition nativisme-empirisme, sur le rôle des facteurs sémantiques et pragmatiques dans l'apprentissage du langage, sur le développement cognitif et l'importance du discours simplifié que les parents adressent aux enfants.
... We discuss the wide-ranging implications of the powerful listening capabilities of adults for theories of first language acquisition. How children learn their first language from the world around them has proven to be an enduring question in psychology, cognitive science, linguistics and related disciplines [1][2][3][4][5] . The degree to which adult caregivers influence the outcome of the language learning process has been central to research on this topic [6][7][8][9][10][11][12] . ...
... For the current work, we identified instances where adult transcribers assigned a conventional American English interpretation to a child's vocalizations. More specifically, we identified tokens produced by children in the intersection of four criteria: (1) possessing mono-or bi-syllabic phonetic forms (motivated in 'Limiting to one-and two-syllable vocalizations' section), (2) possessing no unintelligible or phonology-only tokens in the same utterance (CHILDES codes xxx and yyy, respectively), (3) whose gloss is present as a token in BERT (motivated in 'Tokenization' section) and (4) whose gloss is included in the CMU dictionary. ...
Children’s early speech often bears little resemblance to that of adults, and yet parents and other caregivers are able to interpret that speech and react accordingly. Here we investigate how adult listeners’ inferences reflect sophisticated beliefs about what children are trying to communicate, as well as how children are likely to pronounce words. Using a Bayesian framework for modelling spoken word recognition, we find that computational models can replicate adult interpretations of children’s speech only when they include strong, context-specific prior expectations about the messages that children will want to communicate. This points to a critical role of adult cognitive processes in supporting early communication and reveals how children can actively prompt adults to take actions on their behalf even when they have only a nascent understanding of the adult language. We discuss the wide-ranging implications of the powerful listening capabilities of adults for theories of first language acquisition.
... cause the establishment of such a mapping function in language acquisition is more likely to be successful if there are nonarbitrary links between structures and interpretations (Pinker, 1979), a key problem is to identify those abstract structures and interpretations that may afford principled meaningto-form mappings. A related problem is to determine whether the same principles operate within adult language performance. ...
The distinction between underlying and superficial linguistic structure is a staple of modern cognitive psychology. Despite increasingly diverse conceptions of syntactic relations in linguistic theory, the received view in psycholinguistics has remained one in which the entities assigned to underlying relations may assume different surface relations. The present article examines this view in the context of language production and reviews evidence that the disposition to bind animate entities to the surface subject relation is a basic feature of language use, suggesting that mappings from conceptual categories to syntactic relations form a main support of the bridge from conception to language. Proceeding on this assumption, the article also evaluates competing accounts of the mapping process in production. The results argue against syntactic relation-changing operations, but favor a division between meaning- and form-related mechanisms.
... Such results may help to fill out the picture of production sketched in speech error analyses, and contribute to an explanation of the complicated relationship between structure and meaning in the domain of language use. It is essential that such a relationship exist: As Pinker (1979) ...
In psycholinguistics, the systematic study of language production has begun to take a place beside the study of language comprehension as a means to the end of understanding human language use. Because a major and very visible component of speaking a language is knowing how to create forms to carry messages, efforts to explain language production must confront long-standing questions about the relationship between structure and function in psychological explanation. One traditionally appealing view of that relationship in the realm of language is that sentence structures are associated with or reducible to the general forces of cognition that drive interpretation and communication. This article surveys some of the challenges to this view that emerge from the study of speech errors, and sketches the progress that has been made in developing an alternative view, renewing the argument that syntactic structures are necessary elements in an explanation of language use.
... for learning (Pinker, 1979), would allow us to better formulate hypotheses about how infants actually learn (Frank, 2011;Meltzoff, Kuhl, Movellan & Sejnowski, 2009) or would yield machines that learn in a graceful and robust fashion (Turing, 1950). Here again, the diversity of the proposed models is too large to be reviewed (see Dupoux, 2018, for an attempt). ...
There is a current 'theory crisis' in language acquisition research, resulting from fragmentation both at the level of the approaches and the linguistic level studied. We identify a need for integrative approaches that go beyond these limitations, and propose to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of current theoretical approaches of language acquisition. In particular, we advocate that language learning simulations, if they integrate realistic input and multiple levels of language, have the potential to contribute significantly to our understanding of language acquisition. We then review recent results obtained through such language learning simulations. Finally, we propose some guidelines for the community to build better simulations.
... Semantics is a linguistic science that studies the meaning or meaning contained in a language, not only studying limited meaning but also grammar and semantic elements that represent varied meanings. Semantics are generally divided into grammatical semantics and lexical semantics (Cotterall, 1999;Pinker, 1979). Sociolinguistics is the study of culture in terms of the language used in society. ...
Linguistics is a science that makes language the object of its study. Linguistics itself is divided into two scopes of learning including, microlinguistics and macrolinguistics. Where each scope has a different purpose, microlinguistics studies only limited to the internal structure of language without applying the knowledge in social life, while macro linguistics studies language in relation to the outside world and the application of the language in social life. Linguistics as a science of language can also be the basis for conducting research, where the object of study is the language itself. In conducting research, researchers can use qualitative or quantitative research methods depending on what problem will be the object of research.
... Research has evidenced the crucial role that the social environment has in language acquisition in the first years of life (for a review, see e.g., Kuhl, 2007). Similarly, theoretical frameworks have attempted to outline the feedforward effects of the social environment on language acquisition (Pinker, 1979;Hollich et al., 2000;Tomasello, 2000;Werker and Curtin, 2005;Chater and Manning, 2006;Kuhl, 2007;Frank et al., 2009a;Gogate and Hollich, 2010;Johnson, 2016). This section aims to outline the theoretical frameworks that link the dynamics of the social environment to vocabulary acquisition to provide the motivation for assessing the feedforward effect that infant gaze to faces may have on their vocabulary outcomes. ...
Infants acquire their first words through interactions with social partners. In the first year of life, infants receive a high frequency of visual and auditory input from faces, making faces a potential strong social cue in facilitating word-to-world mappings. In this position paper, we review how and when infant gaze to faces is likely to support their subsequent vocabulary outcomes. We assess the relevance of infant gaze to faces selectively, in three domains: infant gaze to different features within a face (that is, eyes and mouth); then to faces (compared to objects); and finally to more socially relevant types of faces. We argue that infant gaze to faces could scaffold vocabulary construction, but its relevance may be impacted by the developmental level of the infant and the type of task with which they are presented. Gaze to faces proves relevant to vocabulary, as gazes to eyes could inform about the communicative nature of the situation or about the labeled object, while gazes to the mouth could improve word processing, all of which are key cues to highlighting word-to-world pairings. We also discover gaps in the literature regarding how infants’ gazes to faces (versus objects) or to different types of faces relate to vocabulary outcomes. An important direction for future research will be to fill these gaps to better understand the social factors that influence infant vocabulary outcomes.
Corpora of child speech and child-directed speech (CDS) have enabled major contributions to the study of child language acquisition, yet semantic annotation for such corpora is still scarce and lacks a uniform standard. Semantic annotation of CDS is particularly important for understanding the nature of the input children receive and developing computational models of child language acquisition. For example, under the assumption that children are able to infer meaning representations for (at least some of) the utterances they hear, the acquisition task is to learn a grammar that can map novel adult utterances onto their corresponding meaning representations, in the face of noise and distraction by other contextually possible meanings. To study this problem and to develop computational models of it, we need corpora that provide both adult utterances and their meaning representations, ideally using annotation that is consistent across a range of languages in order to facilitate cross-linguistic comparative studies. This paper proposes a methodology for constructing such corpora of CDS paired with sentential logical forms, and uses this method to create two such corpora, in English and Hebrew. The approach enforces a cross-linguistically consistent representation, building on recent advances in dependency representation and semantic parsing. Specifically, the approach involves two steps. First, we annotate the corpora using the Universal Dependencies (UD) scheme for syntactic annotation, which has been developed to apply consistently to a wide variety of domains and typologically diverse languages. Next, we further annotate these data by applying an automatic method for transducing sentential logical forms (LFs) from UD structures. The UD and LF representations have complementary strengths: UD structures are language-neutral and support consistent and reliable annotation by multiple annotators, whereas LFs are neutral as to their syntactic derivation and transparently encode semantic relations. Using this approach, we provide syntactic and semantic annotation for two corpora from CHILDES: Brown’s Adam corpus (English; we annotate ≈\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\approx$$\end{document} 80% of its child-directed utterances), all child-directed utterances from Berman’s Hagar corpus (Hebrew). We verify the quality of the UD annotation using an inter-annotator agreement study, and manually evaluate the transduced meaning representations. We then demonstrate the utility of the compiled corpora through (1) a longitudinal corpus study of the prevalence of different syntactic and semantic phenomena in the CDS, and (2) applying an existing computational model of language acquisition to the two corpora and briefly comparing the results across languages.
Although some current AIs surpass human abilities especially in closed worlds such as board games, their performance in the messy real world is limited. They make strange mistakes and do not notice them. They cannot be instructed easily, fail to use common sense, and lack curiosity. They do not make good collaborators. Neither systems built using the traditional manually-constructed symbolic AI approach nor systems built using generative and deep learning AI approaches including large language models (LLMs) can meet the challenges. They are not well suited for creating robust and trustworthy AIs. Although it is outside of mainstream AI approaches, developmental bootstrapping shows promise. In developmental bootstrapping, AIs develop competences like human children do. They start with innate competences. Like humans, they interact with the environment and learn from their interactions. They incrementally extend their innate competences with self-developed competences. They interact and learn from people and establish perceptual, cognitive, and common grounding. Following a bootstrapping process, they acquire the competences that they need. However, developmental robotics has not yet produced AIs with robust adult-level competences. Projects have typically stopped at the Toddler Barrier corresponding to human infant development at about two years of age, before speech is fluent. They also do not bridge the Reading Barrier, where they can skillfully and skeptically tap into the vast socially developed recorded information resources that power LLMs. The next competences in human cognitive development involve intrinsic motivation, imitation learning, imagination, coordination, and communication. This paper lays out the logic, prospects, gaps, and challenges for extending the practice of developmental bootstrapping to create robust and resilient AIs.
Evolution is a hard problem, and language evolution even more so. There is no easy algorithmic answer to the problem of how language evolved and developed to its present state in the human species. In the absence of direct archeological evidence for language in earlier forms, the subject matter of language evolution becomes an almost intractable problem.
A Functional Taxonomy of Cognitive Mechanisms
I want to argue that the current best candidates for treatment as modular cognitive systems share a certain functional role in the mental life of organisms; the discussion in this section is largely devoted to saying which functional role that is. As often happens in playing cognitive science, it is helpful to characterize the functions of psychological systems by analogy to the organization of idealized computing machines. So, I commence with a brief digression in the direction of computers.
When philosophers of mind think about computers, it is often Turing machines that they are thinking about. And this is understandable. If there is an interesting analogy between minds qua minds and computers qua computers, it ought to be possible to couch it as an analogy between minds and Turing machines, since a Turing machine is, in a certain sense, as general as any kind of computer can be. More precisely: if, as many of us now suppose, minds are essentially symbol-manipulating devices, it ought to be useful to think of minds on the Turing-machine model since Turing machines are (again “in a certain sense”) as general as any symbol-manipulating device can be.
However, as we have already had reason to observe, Turing machines are also very simple devices; their functional architecture is exhaustively surveyed when we have mentioned a small number of interacting subsystems (tape, scanner, printer, and executive) and a small inventory of primitive machine operations (stop, start, move the tape, read the tape, change state, print).
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface between reasoning and other forms of thought. In general, this last set of essays represents growth points in reasoning research, drawing connections to pragmatics, cross-cultural studies, emotion and evolution.
Despite its success in financial markets and other domains, collective intelligence seems to fall short in many critical contexts, including infrequent but repeated financial crises, political polarization and deadlock, and various forms of bias and discrimination. We propose an evolutionary framework that provides fundamental insights into the role of heterogeneity and feedback loops in contributing to failures of collective intelligence. The framework is based on a binary choice model of behavior that affects fitness; hence, behavior is shaped by evolutionary dynamics and stochastic changes in environmental conditions. We derive collective intelligence as an emergent property of evolution in this framework, and also specify conditions under which it fails. We find that political polarization emerges in stochastic environments with reproductive risks that are correlated across individuals. Bias and discrimination emerge when individuals incorrectly attribute random adverse events to observable features that may have nothing to do with those events. In addition, path dependence and negative feedback in evolution may lead to even stronger biases and levels of discrimination, which are locally evolutionarily stable strategies. These results suggest potential policy interventions to prevent such failures by nudging the “madness of mobs” towards the “wisdom of crowds” through targeted shifts in the environment.
This chapter discusses multilingual linguistic representations and probes the question of whether they form a shared linguistic system. Recent psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic studies of multilingual individuals suggest that this is indeed the case. Taking Minimalist morphosyntax and Lardiere’s (2009) feature reassembly as starting points, we consider whether a feature bundle can be updated and re-assembled as a complete unit in the third language, or whether it has to be broken down into separate features which are updated separately. The latter option makes sure that features from both known languages, if they are acquired to a functional level, can exert crosslinguistic influence. Restructuring each feature bundle depends not just on the availability of facilitation, but on other properties of the input which affect what becomes intake in the additional grammar. Both experiential factors (such as dominance and proficiency) and linguistic factors (such as frequency in the input and complexity) can and do affect the acquisition process.
The argument for a propositional over a pictorial representation for visual imagery has largely taken the form of an attack on the logical coherence of pictorial representations. These attacks have not been valid since one can develop a coherent dual-code model involving pictorial and verbal (nonpropositional) representations. On the other hand, empirical demonstrations that are claimed to support pictorial representations fail to discriminate such representations from propositional ones. It is argued that the failure of the anti- and pro-pictorial arguments stems from a fundamental indeterminancy in deciding issues of representations. It is shown that wide classes of different representations, and in particular propositional vs dual-code models, can be made to yield identical behavior predictions. Criteria such as parsimony and efficiency in addition to prediction of behavior may yield further constraints on representation; and, in particular, it may be possible to establish whether there are 2 codes, one for visual information and one for verbal, or whether there is a single abstract code. It is concluded that barring decisive physiological data, it will not be possible to establish whether an internal representation is pictorial or propositional. (69 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Identifiability in the limit is studied, with special reference to transformational languages on a given base. First a theorem is proved which gives necessary conditions for a class of languages to be identifiable in the limit. With added assumptions, these conditions become sufficient for identifiability. The question of whether the class of transformational languages on a fixed context-free base is identifiable is studied. Counterexamples, that is, context-free grammars for which the set of transformational languages is not identifiable, are exhibited. One of these examples involves no deletion, the use of the transformational cycle and only binary transformations.
Some theorems from the theory of grammatical inference are used to clarify various issues in the now obsolete study of LAD as a model of human language acquisition. It is shown that large part of the psycholinguistic literature concerning the LAD model is based on two assumptions which find neither mathematical nor empirical support. Suggestions are made for a more promissing extension of the inference model.
Studies of filled and silent pauses performed in the last two decades are reviewed in order to determine the significance of pauses for the speaker. Following a brief history, the theoretical implications of pause location are examined and the relevant studies summarized. In addition, the functional significance of pauses is considered in terms of cognitive, affective-state, and social interaction variables.
Subjects were given 3200 presentations of sentences in a miniature artificial language under two conditions: Sentences were presented either alone or with pictures they described. There was virtually no learning of syntax in the former condition but excellent learning in the latter. After syntax was learned via the mediation of pictures, the syntactic class membership of new words could be learned in a purely verbal context, without reference to pictures. This learning was sometimes, but not necessarily, mediated by imagery. Thus, it appears that much of early syntax learning must be mediated through an understanding of the reference field, while later learning may be built directly upon the already existing syntactic framework.
College students learned a miniature phrase-structural language employing nonsense syllables as words in one of four conditions: in the first, the language had no reference; in the second, each sentence referred to a picture created out of geometric forms, but there was an arbitrary association of words with pictorial features; in the third, there was a similar reference field and words belonging to the same syntactic class referred to items belonging to the same visual class; the fourth was like the third, but in addition, syntactic constraints in sentences mirrored logical constraints in the pictures. Learning of complex features of syntax was possible only when these reflected properties of, or constraints in, the reference field.
The assumption that language acquisition is relatively independent of the amount and kind of language input must be assessed in light of information about the speech actually heard by young children. The speech of middle-class mothers to 2-year-old children was found to be simpler and more redundant than their speech to 10-year-old children. The mothers modified their speech less when talking to children whose responses they could not observe, indicating that the children played some role in eliciting the speech modifications. Task difficulty did not contribute to the mothers' production of simplified, redundant speech. Experienced mothers were only slightly better than nonmothers in predicting the speech-style modifications required by young children. These findings indicate that children who are learning language have available a sample of speech which is simpler, more redundant, and less confusing than normal adult speech.
A traditional grammar has serious limitations so far as linguistic science is concerned. Its basic inadequacy lies in an essential appeal to what can be only called as the “linguistic intuition” of the intelligent reader. It is important to realize that a taxonomic grammar of the traditional kind is not merely a partial grammar that omits certain facts about the language. The understanding of a reader contributes not in identifying new facts, but a technique for organizing and arranging facts. With diligence and application, an intelligent adult can use a traditional grammar to develop some degree of mastery of a new language. A young child is able to gain perfect mastery of a language with incomparably greater ease and without any explicit instruction. Any serious investigation of syntax will quickly bring to the light peculiarities of distribution that appear to require numerous special and isolated rules. The so-called “anomalous finite verbs” of English provide a simple illustration. A constituent structure grammar containing only rewriting rules can cover all the facts only by a variety of special rules.
How to explain the fact that children learn language is a central problem for both psychology and linguistics. Suppes says that “the linguists' insistence that they will accept nothing less than a complete and detailed account will probably turn out to be the most important conceptual demand on psychology in this century”. This paper speaks to that demand by presenting a complete formal characterization of the learning process and the language environment in which it operates. The assumptions are in general accord with psychological and linguistic principles. It is proved that the system converges; that is, the learning process, acting on the linguistic information it receives, learns the language, according to a formal criterion.
In Part I, four ostensibly different theoretical models of induction are presented, in which the problem dealt with is the extrapolation of a very long sequence of symbols—presumably containing all of the information to be used in the induction. Almost all, if not all problems in induction can be put in this form.
Some strong heuristic arguments have been obtained for the equivalence of the last three models. One of these models is equivalent to a Bayes formulation, in which a priori probabilities are assigned to sequences of symbols on the basis of the lengths of inputs to a universal Turing machine that are required to produce the sequence of interest as output.
Though it seems likely, it is not certain whether the first of the four models is equivalent to the other three.
Few rigorous results are presented. Informal investigations are made of the properties of these models. There are discussions of their consistency and meaningfulness, of their degree of independence of the exact nature of the Turing machine used, and of the accuracy of their predictions in comparison to those of other induction methods.
In Part II these models are applied to the solution of three problems—prediction of the Bernoulli sequence, extrapolation of a certain kind of Markov chain, and the use of phrase structure grammars for induction.
Though some approximations are used, the first of these problems is treated most rigorously. The result is Laplace's rule of succession.
The solution to the second problem uses less certain approximations, but the properties of the solution that are discussed, are fairly independent of these approximations.
The third application, using phrase structure grammars, is least exact of the three. First a formal solution is presented. Though it appears to have certain deficiencies, it is hoped that presentation of this admittedly inadequate model will suggest acceptable improvements in it. This formal solution is then applied in an approximate way to the determination of the “optimum” phrase structure grammar for a given set of strings. The results that are obtained are plausible, but subject to the uncertainties of the approximation used.
The paper is concerned with the theoretical underpinnings for semantic network representations. It is concerned specifically with understanding the semantics of the semantic network structures themselves, i.e., with what the notations and structures used in a semantic network can mean, and with interpretations of what these links mean that will be logically adequate to the job of representing knowledge. It focuses on several issues: the meaning of 'semantics', the need for explicit understanding of the intended meanings for various types of arcs and links, the need for careful thought in choosing conventions for representing facts as assemblages of arcs and nodes, and several specific difficult problems in knowledge representation - especially problems of relative clauses and quantification.
Some aspects of a theory of grammar are presented which derive from a formal theory of language acquisition. One aspect of the theory is a universal constraint on analyzability known as the Freezing Principle, which supplants a variety of constraints proposed in the literature. A second aspect of the theory is the Invariance Principle, a constraint on the relationship between semantic and syntactic structure that makes verifiable predictions of syntactic universals. The relationship between the notion of 'explanatory adequacy' of a theory of grammar and the learnability of a class of transformational grammars is discussed.
From the Preface (See Front Matter for full Preface) The study of formal languages constitutes an important subarea of computer science. This area sprang to life around 1956 when Noam Chomsky gave a mathematical model of a grammar in connection with his study of natural languages. Shortly afterwards, the concept of a grammar was found to be of great importance to the programmer when the syntax of the programming language ALGOL was defined by a context-free grammar. This development led naturally to syntax-directed compiling and the concept of a compiler compiler. Since then a considerable flurry of activity has taken place, the results of which have related formal languages and automata theory to such an extent that it is impossible to treat the areas separately. By now, no serious study of computer science would be complete without a knowledge of the techniques and results from language and automata theory. This book presents the theory of formal languages as a coherent theory and makes explicit its relationship to automata. The book begins with an explanation of the notion of a finite description of a language. The fundamental descriptive device--the grammar--is explained, as well as its three major subclasses--regular, context-free, and context-sensitive grammars. The context-free grammars are treated in detail, and such topics as normal forms, derivation trees, and ambiguity are covered. Four types of automata equivalent to the four types of grammars are described. These automata are the finite automaton, the pushdown automaton, the linear bounded automaton, and the Turing machine. The Turing machine is covered in detail, and unsolvability of the halting problem shown. The book concludes with certain advanced topics in language theory--closure properties, computational complexity, deterministic pushdown automata, LR(k) grammars, stack automata, and decidability.
Investigated the role of peer language imitation in preschool children's vocabulary acquisition. Study I involved natural observations of children in day care situations. In Study II, children were introduced by naive peers was observed. (Author/SB)
For the purposes of the present discussion, the term structure will be used in the following non-rigorous sense: A set of phonemes or a set of data is structured in respect to some feature, to the extent that we can form in terms of that feature some organized system of statements which describes the members of the set and their interrelations (at least up to some limit of complexity). In this sense, language can be structured in respect to various independent features. And whether it is structured (to more than a trivial extent) in respect to, say, regular historical change, social intercourse, meaning, or distribution — or to what extent it is structured in any of these respects — is a matter decidable by investigation. Here we will discuss how each language can be described in terms of a distributional structure, i.e. in terms of the occurrence of parts (ultimately sounds) relative to other parts, and how this description is complete without intrusion of other features such as history or meaning. It goes without saying that other studies of language — historical, psychological, etc.—are also possible, both in relation to distributional structure and independently of it.
A speech act approach to the transition from pre-linguistic to linguistic communication is adopted in order to consider language in relation to behaviour generally and to allow for an emphasis on the USE of language rather than on its form. The structure of language is seen as non-arbitrary in that it reflects both attention structures (via predication) and action structures (via the fundamental case grammatical form of language). Linguistic concepts are first realized in action. A pilot study focusing on the regulation of JOINT attention and JOINT activity within the context of mutuality between mother and infant is discussed, with emphasis on ritualization in mutual play as a vehicle for understanding the development of the formal structures of language.
An information-processing approach to language learning resulted in a computer program called Zbie, which accepts tree structured descriptions of simple situations, and improves its capacity to express these situations in the natural language that it learns.As it learns, the program builds on the tree structures classes of situations, called patterns, that have similar expressions in the language. Translation rules for the patterns and an in-context vocabulary permit Zbie to express a situation in the natural language. Learning is guided by a least-effort expectation heuristic.The program utilizes standard information-processing techniques and such simple data structures as sets, ordered lists and trees. In spite of its modest capabilities, Zbie is sensitive to the problem of context and deals with recursion in a natural fashion. The program, although limited, supports the hypothesis that language-learning need not require postulated separate language-acquisition devices.
This chapter presents a survey of results in grammatical inference. The grammatical inference problem can be described as follows: a finite set of symbol strings from some language L and possibly a finite set of strings from the complement of L are known, and a grammar for the language is to be discovered. Any attempt to formalize the grammatical inference problem must include precise formulations of several concepts. The four central notions are: (1) the hypothesis space, (2) the measure of adequacy, (3) the rules by which the samples are drawn, and (4) the criterion for success in the limit of the inference process. The chapter discusses the intermediate behavior of inference algorithms and criteria for choosing a grammar on the basis of a finite amount of information along with a number of methods which have been developed for inferring grammars and evaluate some of their properties. In the typical inference situation, the grammars that are of interest will tend to be more complex if they are nearer the right end of the spectrum and so the decision as to which grammar to choose rests on the questions of how tight a fit is required and how much complexity can be tolerated.
The ‘innateness hypothesis’ (henceforth, the ‘I.H.’) is a daring — or apparently daring; it may be meaningless, in which case it is not daring — hypothesis proposed by Noam Chomsky. I owe a debt of gratitude to Chomsky for having repeatedly exposed me to the I.H.; I have relied heavily in what follows on oral communications from him; and I beg his pardon in advance if I misstate the I.H. in any detail, or misrepresent any of the arguments for it. In addition to relying upon oral communications from Chomsky, I have also relied upon Chomsky’s paper ‘Explanatory Models in Linguistics’, in which the I.H. plays a considerable rôle.
The problem of grammatical inference is introduced, and its potential engineering applications are demonstrated. Inference algorithms for finite-state and context-free grammars are presented. The application of some of the algorithms to the inference of pattern grammars in syntactic pattern recognition is illustrated by examples.