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I generally have very little good to say about the grant application process, but it does force me to catch up on my reading. I just finished several papers by Amy Perfors, who I think does some of the more interesting computational models of language out there.*
A strange sociological fact about language research is that people generally come in two camps: a) those who don't (really) believe language is properly characterized by hierarchical phrase structure and also don't believe in much innate structure but do believe in powerful innate learning mechanisms, and b) those who believe language is properly characterized by *innate* hierarchical phrase structure and who don't put much emphasis on learning mechanisms. But there's no logically necessary connection between being a Nativist and believing in hierarchical phrase structure or being an Empiricist and believing in relatively simple syntactic forms. In the last few years, Perfors has been staking out some of that (largely) unclaimed territory where hierarchical phrase structure and Empiricism meet.
In "The learnability of abstract syntactic principles," she and her colleagues consider the claim by (some) Nativists that children must have an innate expectation that language be something like a hierarchical context-free grammar because there isn't enough data in the input to rule out alternative grammars. (Empiricists often buck the whole question by saying language is no such thing.) Perfors et al. show that, in fact, with some relatively simple assumptions and a powerful (Bayesian) learning device, the learner would conclude that the most likely representation of English is a hierarchical context-free grammar, based on relatively little input (reproducing what happened in linguistics, where linguists came to the same conclusion). You do have to assume that children have the innate capacity to represent such grammars, but you don't need to assume that they prefer such grammars.
"Joint acquisition of word order and word reference" presents some interesting data bearing on a number of questions, but following the theme above, she notes that her model does not require very much data to conclude that the typical word-order in English is subject-verb-object. She and her colleagues note: "The fact that word order can be acquired quickly from so [little data] despite the lack of bias [for a particular word order] may suggest no need to hypothesize that children are born with strong innate constraints on word ordering to explain their rapid acquisition."
I'm sympathetic to all these points, and I think they bring an important perspective to the question of language learning (one that is not, I should say, unique to Perfors, but certainly a minority perspective). What I can't help wondering is this: she (and others) show that you could learn the structure of language based on the input without (certain) innate assumptions that the input will be of a particular sort. Fine. But why is the input of that particular sort across (most? all?) languages? One thing the Nativist positions Perfors argues against have going for them is that they give a (more or less) principled explanation. Empiricists (typically) do not. (I am aware that some try to give explanations in terms of optimal information structure. What I have seen of this work has not struck me as overwhelmingly convincing, but I admit I haven't read enough of it and that I am willing to be convinced, though my prior on this line of argumentation is fairly low).
*My quasi-journalistic training always makes me want to disclose when I know personally the people I am writing about. But psycholinguistics is a small world. It would be safe for the reader to assume that I know *all* of the people I write about to one degree or another.
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Perfors A, Tenenbaum JB, & Regier T (2010). The learnability of abstract syntactic principles. Cognition PMID: 21186021
Maurits, L., Perfors, A., & Navarro, D. (2009). Joint acquisition of word order and word reference Proceedings o the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 1728-1733
A strange sociological fact about language research is that people generally come in two camps: a) those who don't (really) believe language is properly characterized by hierarchical phrase structure and also don't believe in much innate structure but do believe in powerful innate learning mechanisms, and b) those who believe language is properly characterized by *innate* hierarchical phrase structure and who don't put much emphasis on learning mechanisms. But there's no logically necessary connection between being a Nativist and believing in hierarchical phrase structure or being an Empiricist and believing in relatively simple syntactic forms. In the last few years, Perfors has been staking out some of that (largely) unclaimed territory where hierarchical phrase structure and Empiricism meet.
In "The learnability of abstract syntactic principles," she and her colleagues consider the claim by (some) Nativists that children must have an innate expectation that language be something like a hierarchical context-free grammar because there isn't enough data in the input to rule out alternative grammars. (Empiricists often buck the whole question by saying language is no such thing.) Perfors et al. show that, in fact, with some relatively simple assumptions and a powerful (Bayesian) learning device, the learner would conclude that the most likely representation of English is a hierarchical context-free grammar, based on relatively little input (reproducing what happened in linguistics, where linguists came to the same conclusion). You do have to assume that children have the innate capacity to represent such grammars, but you don't need to assume that they prefer such grammars.
"Joint acquisition of word order and word reference" presents some interesting data bearing on a number of questions, but following the theme above, she notes that her model does not require very much data to conclude that the typical word-order in English is subject-verb-object. She and her colleagues note: "The fact that word order can be acquired quickly from so [little data] despite the lack of bias [for a particular word order] may suggest no need to hypothesize that children are born with strong innate constraints on word ordering to explain their rapid acquisition."
I'm sympathetic to all these points, and I think they bring an important perspective to the question of language learning (one that is not, I should say, unique to Perfors, but certainly a minority perspective). What I can't help wondering is this: she (and others) show that you could learn the structure of language based on the input without (certain) innate assumptions that the input will be of a particular sort. Fine. But why is the input of that particular sort across (most? all?) languages? One thing the Nativist positions Perfors argues against have going for them is that they give a (more or less) principled explanation. Empiricists (typically) do not. (I am aware that some try to give explanations in terms of optimal information structure. What I have seen of this work has not struck me as overwhelmingly convincing, but I admit I haven't read enough of it and that I am willing to be convinced, though my prior on this line of argumentation is fairly low).
*My quasi-journalistic training always makes me want to disclose when I know personally the people I am writing about. But psycholinguistics is a small world. It would be safe for the reader to assume that I know *all* of the people I write about to one degree or another.
*********
Perfors A, Tenenbaum JB, & Regier T (2010). The learnability of abstract syntactic principles. Cognition PMID: 21186021
Maurits, L., Perfors, A., & Navarro, D. (2009). Joint acquisition of word order and word reference Proceedings o the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 1728-1733