Empiricism and Language Learnability
Nick Chater, Alexander Clark, John A. Goldsmith, and Amy Perfors
Abstract
This book explores one of the central problems in theoretical linguistics: learnability. The chapters, written from different perspectives—linguistics, philosophy, computer science, psychology, and cognitive science—explore the idea that language acquisition proceeds through general purpose learning mechanisms, an approach that is broadly empiricist both methodologically and psychologically. For many years, the empiricist approach has been taken to be infeasible on practical and theoretical grounds. This book presents a variety of precisely specified mathematical and computational models that ... More
This book explores one of the central problems in theoretical linguistics: learnability. The chapters, written from different perspectives—linguistics, philosophy, computer science, psychology, and cognitive science—explore the idea that language acquisition proceeds through general purpose learning mechanisms, an approach that is broadly empiricist both methodologically and psychologically. For many years, the empiricist approach has been taken to be infeasible on practical and theoretical grounds. This book presents a variety of precisely specified mathematical and computational models that show that empiricist approaches can form a viable solution to the problem of language acquisition.
Keywords:
learnability,
language acquisition,
empiricist,
computational models
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198734260 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198734260.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Nick Chater, author
Professor of Behavioural Science, Warwick Business School, UK
Alexander Clark, author
Lecturer in Logic and Linguistics, King's College, London, UK
John A. Goldsmith, author
Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science, University of Chicago, USA
Amy Perfors, author
Lecturer, School of Psychology, University of Adelaide, Australia
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