Many patterns found in natural language syntax have multiple possible explanations or structural descriptions. Even within the currently dominant Minimalist theoretical framework (Chomsky 1995, 2000), it is not uncommon to encounter multiple analyses for the same phenomenon proposed in the literature. A natural question, then, is whether one could…

Language is one of the hallmarks of intelligence, demanding explanation in a theory of human cognition. However, language presents unique practical challenges for quantitative empirical research, making many linguistic theories difficult to test at naturalistic scales. Artificial neural network language models (LMs) provide a new tool for studying…

Syntactic structures are unobserved theoretical constructs which are useful in explaining a wide range of linguistic and psychological phenomena. Language acquisition studies how such latent structures are acquired by human learners through many hypothesized learning mechanisms and apparatuses, which can be genetically endowed or of general…