Every environment contains infinite potential features and correlations among features, or patterns. Detecting valid and learnable patterns in one environment is beneficial for learners because doing so lends predictability to new environments where the same or analogous patterns recur. However, some apparent correlations among features reflect…

Traditional flat-structured bigram and trigram models of phonotactics are useful because they capture a large number of facts about phonological processes. Additionally, these models predict that local interactions should be easier to learn than long-distance ones because long-distance dependencies are difficult to capture with these models.…

Some aspects of a general systems theory of second language acquisition are as follows: the system is greater than the sum of its parts; each component has a distinctive role in the overall operation of the system; some components may be entire systems themselves; the workings of the system proceed according to patterns, and rules for any given…