The induction problems facing language learners have played a central role in debates
about the types of learning biases that exist in the human brain. Many linguists have argued …

A major goal of linguistics and cognitive science is to understand what class of learning
systems can acquire natural language. Until recently, the computational requirements of …

This book explains a well-known puzzle that helped catalyze the establishment of
generative syntax: how children tease apart the different syntactic structures associated with …

This book puts cognition back at the heart of the language learning process and challenges
the idea that language acquisition can be meaningfully understood as a purely linguistic …

The key aim of this special issue is to make developmental theory proposals concrete
enough to evaluate with empirical data. With this in mind, I discuss proposals from the …

Informative computational modeling can be an invaluable tool for understanding syntactic
acquisition. In this chapter, I describe how modeling can be used to both formalize specific …

This article explores English-speaking children's acquisition of raising structures with an
experiencer (eg, John seems to Mary to be happy). We review and address previously …

A long-standing puzzle in linguistic theory is how children come to figure out the structure of
sentences in which the semantic relations among the words do not “line up” with their …

Highly abstract predicates (eg think) present a number of difficulties for language learners. A
partial solution to learning these verbs is that learners exploit regularities in the syntactic …

Learning in any domain depends on how the data for learning are represented. In the
domain of language acquisition, children's representations of the speech they hear …