Related papers: A Language-agnostic Model of Child Language Acquis…
Earlier research has suggested that human infants might use statistical dependencies between speech and non-linguistic multimodal input to bootstrap their language learning before they know how to segment words from running speech. However,…
This work develops a probabilistic child language acquisition model to learn a range of linguistic phenonmena, most notably long-range syntactic dependencies of the sort found in object wh-questions, among other constructions. The model is…
Children learning their first language face multiple problems of induction: how to learn the meanings of words, and how to build meaningful phrases from those words according to syntactic rules. We consider how children might solve these…
During language acquisition, children follow a typical sequence of learning stages, whereby they first learn to categorize phonemes before they develop their lexicon and eventually master increasingly complex syntactic structures. However,…
We investigate how neural language models acquire individual words during training, extracting learning curves and ages of acquisition for over 600 words on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (Fenson et al., 2007).…
Human language acquisition is an efficient, supervised, and continual process. In this work, we took inspiration from how human babies acquire their first language, and developed a computational process for word acquisition through…
Semantic and syntactic bootstrapping posit that children use their prior knowledge of one linguistic domain, say syntactic relations, to help later acquire another, such as the meanings of new words. Empirical results supporting both…
Predicting the words that a child is going to learn next can be useful for boosting language acquisition, and such predictions have been shown to be possible with both neural network techniques (looking at changes in the vocabulary state…
We introduce quantitative metrics for child language acquisition to evaluate language models. Our focus is on the formal syntactic and functional discourse properties of determiners in English, which young children acquire early and…
In what ways might statistical signals in linguistic input assist with the acquisition of syntax? Here we hypothesize a mechanism called collocational bootstrapping, in which regularities in word co-occurrence patterns can provide cues to…
Learning to understand speech appears almost effortless for typically developing infants, yet from an information-processing perspective, acquiring a language from acoustic speech is an enormous challenge. This chapter reviews recent…
Children learn their native language by exposure to their linguistic and communicative environment, but apparently without requiring that their mistakes are corrected. Such learning from positive evidence has been viewed as raising logical…
Humans' experience of the world is profoundly multimodal from the beginning, so why do existing state-of-the-art language models only use text as a modality to learn and represent semantic meaning? In this paper we review the literature on…
Multilingualism is incredibly common around the world, leading to many important theoretical and practical questions about how children learn multiple languages at once. For example, does multilingual acquisition lead to delays in learning?…
This document chronicles this author's attempt to explore how words come to mean what they do, with a particular focus on child language acquisition and what that means for models of language understanding.\footnote{I say \emph{historical}…
Is child-directed language (CDL) optimized to support language learning, and which aspects of linguistic development does it facilitate? We investigate this question using neural language models trained on CDL versus adult-directed language…
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…
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…
`No' belongs to the first ten words used by children and embodies the first active form of linguistic negation. Despite its early occurrence the details of its acquisition process remain largely unknown. The circumstance that `no' cannot be…