The last two decades have seen a significant amount of interest in bilingual language learning and processing. A number of computational models have also been developed to account for bilingualism, with varying degrees of success. In this article, we first briefly introduce the significance of computational approaches to bilingual language…

Infants build knowledge by acting on the world. We conducted an ecologically grounded test of an embodied learning hypothesis: that infants' active engagement with objects in the home environment elicits caregiver naming and cascades to learning object names. Our home-based study extends laboratory-based theories to identify real-world processes…

This study addresses whether there is anything special about learning a third language, as compared to learning a second language, that results solely from the order of acquisition. We use a computational model based on the mathematical framework of Linear Discriminative Learning to explore this question for the acquisition of a small trilingual…

Historically, first language acquisition research was a painstaking process of observation, requiring the laborious hand coding of children's linguistic productions, followed by the generation of abstract theoretical proposals for how the developmental process unfolds. Recently, the ability to collect large-scale corpora of children's language…

Usage-based approaches explore how we learn language from our experience of language. Related research thus involves the analysis of the usage from which learners learn and of learner usage as it develops. This program involves considerable data recording, transcription, and analysis, using a variety of corpus and computational techniques, many of…

Drawing on usage-based linguistics and its exemplar-based path of language learning, from recurring multiword expressions to increasingly abstract, schematized constructions, this article examines evidence for the exemplar-based developmental sequences for yes/no interrogatives and WH interrogatives in English as a second language (L2). The…

In the past 15 years, a substantial body of evidence has confirmed that a powerful distributional learning mechanism is present in infants, children, adults and (at least to some degree) in nonhuman animals as well. The present article briefly reviews this literature and then examines some of the fundamental questions that must be addressed for…

Humans are remarkably sensitive to the statistical structure of language. However, different mechanisms have been proposed to account for such statistical sensitivities. The present study compared adult learning of syntax and the ability of two models of statistical learning to simulate human performance: Simple Recurrent Networks, which learn by…

This article investigates an argument-adjunct asymmetry in English as a second language (ESL) learners' acquisition of inversion in "wh"-questions. A generative approach (DeVilliers, 1991; Stromswold, 1990) claims that inversion is acquired earlier in argument "wh"-questions than in adjunct "wh"-questions, the asymmetry resulting from their…