This volume presents advances by leading researchers in computational modelling of language acquisition. Sophisticated theoretical models can now be tested using simulation techniques and large corpora of linguistic data. Renewed interest in learning neural networks and the ability to test new solutions to fundamental problems has fuelled debates in an already very active field. The 24 authors in this collection have been drawn from departments of linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, and computer science. The book as a whole shows what light may be thrown on fundamental problems when powerful computational techniques are combined with real data. A central question addressed in the book concerns the extent to which linguistic structure is readily available in the environment. The authors consider the evidence in relation to word boundaries and phonotactic structure, stress patterns, text-to-speech rules, and the mapping of lexical semantics, one author arguing that a child's own output may serve as a key source of linguistic input.
Peter Broeder and Jaap Murre:
Chapter 1: Introduction. Part I: Words. Brian MacWhinney:
Chapter 2: Lexicalist Connectionism. Noel Sharkey, Amanda Sharkey, and Stuart Jackson:
Chapter 3: Are SRNs Sufficient for Modelling Language Acquisition?. Antal van den Bosch and Walter Daelemans:
Chapter 4: A Distributed, Yet Symbolic Model for Text-to-Speech Processing. Steven Gillis, Walter Daelemans, and Gert Durieux:
Chapter 5: "Lazy Learning": A Comparison of Natural and Machine Learning of Word Stress. Part II: Word Formation. Richard Shillcock, Paul Cairns, Nick Chater, and Joe Levy:
Chapter 6: Statistical and Connectionist Modelling of the Development of Speech Segmentation. Jeffrey Mark Siskind:
Chapter 7: Learning Word-to-Meaning Mappings. Gary Marcus:
Chapter 8: Children's Overregularization and its Implication for Cognition. Rainer Goebel and Peter Indefrey:
Chapter 9: The Performance of a Recurrent Network with Short Term Memory Capacity Learning the German -S Plural. Ramin Nakisa, Kim Plunkett, and Ulrike Hahn:
Chapter 19: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison of Single and Dual-Route Models of Inflectional Morphology. Part III: Word Order. Partha Nyogi and Robert C. Berwick:
Chapter 11: Formal Models for Learning in the Principles and Parameters Framework. Loeki Elbers:
Chapter 12: An Output-as-Input Hypothesis for Language Acquisition: Arguments, Model, Evidence
