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Humans can learn languages from remarkably little experience. Developing computational models that explain this ability has been a major challenge in cognitive science. Bayesian models that build in strong inductive biases - factors that…
Grammatical features across human languages show intriguing correlations often attributed to learning biases in humans. However, empirical evidence has been limited to experiments with highly simplified artificial languages, and whether…
Finding and facilitating commonalities between the linguistic behaviors of large language models and humans could lead to major breakthroughs in our understanding of the acquisition, processing, and evolution of language. However, most…
Recent artificial neural networks that process natural language achieve unprecedented performance in tasks requiring sentence-level understanding. As such, they could be interesting models of the integration of linguistic information in the…
Learning to follow human instructions is a long-pursued goal in artificial intelligence. The task becomes particularly challenging if no prior knowledge of the employed language is assumed while relying only on a handful of examples to…
Natural and artificial audition can in principle acquire different solutions to a given problem. The constraints of the task, however, can nudge the cognitive science and engineering of audition to qualitatively converge, suggesting that a…
Language is crucial for human intelligence, but what exactly is its role? We take language to be a part of a system for understanding and communicating about situations. The human ability to understand and communicate about situations…
Background: In times when the ability to program is becoming increasingly important, it is still difficult to teach students to become successful programmers. One remarkable aspect are recent findings from neuro-imaging studies, which…
Deep neural networks drive the success of natural language processing. A fundamental property of language is its compositional structure, allowing humans to systematically produce forms for new meanings. For humans, languages with more…
Human memory is fleeting. As words are processed, the exact wordforms that make up incoming sentences are rapidly lost. Cognitive scientists have long believed that this limitation of memory may, paradoxically, help in learning language -…
What role can the otherwise successful Large Language Models (LLMs) play in the understanding of human cognition, and in particular in terms of informing language acquisition debates? To contribute to this question, we first argue that…
A major target of linguistics and cognitive science has been to understand what class of learning systems can acquire the key structures of natural language. Until recently, the computational requirements of language have been used to argue…
The success of neural language models (LMs) on many technological tasks has brought about their potential relevance as scientific theories of language despite some clear differences between LM training and child language acquisition. In…
Current language models are considered to have sub-human capabilities at natural language tasks like question-answering or writing code. However, language models are not trained to perform well at these tasks, they are trained to accurately…
We investigate what kind of structural knowledge learned in neural network encoders is transferable to processing natural language. We design artificial languages with structural properties that mimic natural language, pretrain encoders on…
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as large language models (LLMs) are already altering student learning. Unlike previous technologies, LLMs can independently solve problems regardless of student understanding, yet are not always…
This chapter critically examines the potential contributions of modern language models to theoretical linguistics. Despite their focus on engineering goals, these models' ability to acquire sophisticated linguistic knowledge from mere…
The recent proliferation of research into transformer based natural language processing has led to a number of studies which attempt to detect the presence of human-like cognitive behavior in the models. We contend that, as is true of human…
Prediction in language has traditionally been studied using simple designs in which neural responses to expected and unexpected words are compared in a categorical fashion. However, these designs have been contested as being `prediction…
Natural Language Processing is one of the leading application areas in the current resurgence of Artificial Intelligence, spearheaded by Artificial Neural Networks. We show that despite their many successes at performing linguistic tasks,…