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How do humans learn language, and can the first language be learned at all? These fundamental questions are still hotly debated. In contemporary linguistics, there are two major schools of thought that give completely opposite answers.…
In this article, we present a fresh perspective on language, combining ideas from various sources, but mixed in a new synthesis. As in the minimalist program, the question is whether we can formulate an elegant formalism, a universal…
We investigate mechanisms for language change within a framework where an unconventional signal for a meaning is first innovated, and then subsequently propagated through a speech community to replace the existing convention. We appeal to…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
Cooking is a uniquely human endeavor for transforming raw ingredients into delicious dishes. Over centuries, cultures worldwide have evolved diverse cooking practices ingrained in their culinary traditions. Recipes, thus, are cultural…
Abstract grammatical knowledge - of parts of speech and grammatical patterns - is key to the capacity for linguistic generalization in humans. But how abstract is grammatical knowledge in large language models? In the human literature,…
The principle behind algebraic language theory for various kinds of structures, such as words or trees, is to use a compositional function from the structures into a finite set. To talk about compositionality, one needs some way of…
How universal is human conceptual structure? The way concepts are organized in the human brain may reflect distinct features of cultural, historical, and environmental background in addition to properties universal to human cognition.…
We explore how the social dynamics of communication and learning can bring about the rise of a syntactic communication in a population of speakers. Our study is developed starting from a version of the Naming Game model where an elementary…
We aim to provide an explanation for how the human brain might connect words for sentence formation. A novel approach to modeling syntactic representation is introduced, potentially showing the existence of universal syntactic structures…
Language models can produce fluent, grammatical text. Nonetheless, some maintain that language models don't really learn language and also that, even if they did, that would not be informative for the study of human learning and processing.…
Language provides simple ways of communicating generalizable knowledge to each other (e.g., "Birds fly", "John hikes", "Fire makes smoke"). Though found in every language and emerging early in development, the language of generalization is…
Grammars are used to describe sentences structure, thanks to some sets of rules, which depends on the grammar type. A classification of grammars has been made by Noam Chomsky, which led to four well-known types. Yet, there are other types…
Human language and its governing rules present a number of analogies with the organization and structure of communication and information management in living organisms. This chapter will provide a short general introduction about grammar,…
Recent approaches to human concept learning have successfully combined the power of symbolic, infinitely productive rule systems and statistical learning to explain our ability to learn new concepts from just a few examples. The aim of most…
Human language has a distinct systematic structure, where utterances break into individually meaningful words which are combined to form phrases. We show that natural-language-like systematicity arises in codes that are constrained by a…
The grammars of natural languages may be learned by using genetic algorithms that reproduce and mutate grammatical rules and part-of-speech tags, improving the quality of later generations of grammatical components. Syntactic rules are…
Human languages have evolved to be structured through repeated language learning and use. These processes introduce biases that operate during language acquisition and shape linguistic systems toward communicative efficiency. In this paper,…
Parametric approaches to grammatical diversity range from Chomsky's 1981 classical Principles & Parameters model to minimalist reinterpretations: in some proposals of the latter framework, parameters need not be an extensional list given at…