In this paper we present three design principles of language--experience, heterogeneity and redundancy--and present recent developments in a family of models incorporating them, namely Data-Oriented Parsing/Unsupervised Data-Oriented Parsing. Although the idea of some form of redundant storage has become part and parcel of parsing technologies and…

Previous research indicates that infants generalize syntactic-like structures to novel exemplars in a way that has been characterized as abstract and algebraic (Marcus et al., 1999). Infants appear to learn and generalize from speech more successfully than from nonspeech stimuli (Marcus, Fernandes, & Johnson, 2007). In this series of experiments,…

To evaluate the orthographic and phonological processing skills of developmental dyslexics, we (a) examined their abilities to exploit properties of orthographic redundancy and (b) tested whether their phonological deficit extends to spelling-to-sound connections for large-grain size units such as syllables. To assess the processing skills in…

Notes that three papers and commentary (in this issue) emphasized importance of including data on manual modality when studying language development and its relationship to other domains. Discusses advantages of using robustness analysis rather than precursor relations to study domain relations. Suggests alternative theoretical context to which…

A current limitation of the connectionist approach to second language acquisition (SLA) research is that it does not, to my knowledge, include complex linguistic representations. This article proposes a partial solution to this limitation by motivating and illustrating specific analyses that utilize the signbased representations developed within…

Investigates why young children become redundant and informative speakers after listening to nonredundant and informative speakers. The authors conclude that children confuse the length of a message with information. (Author/DB)

Words artificially isolated from 12 parents' speech to their children aged 1;10-3;0 were significantly less intelligible to adult listeners than words originally spoken to an adult. While parents did not adjust the clarity of words, their speech was more redundant in anticipation of the children's comprehension. Research implications are…