In this dissertation, I establish a research program that uses computational modeling as a testbed for theories of phonological learning. This dissertation focuses on a fundamental question: how do children acquire sound patterns from noisy, real-world data, especially in the presence of lexical exceptions that defy regular patterns? For instance,…

Despite OT's success, opaque alternations prove difficult to capture with constraints, and some violate the theory's formal restrictions. Here, I propose a novel account of opacity drawing upon developments in psychology. Rather than one grammar, I propose a dual-system model with implicit and explicit mechanisms, a domain-specific OT-like system…

This provocative article raises many important issues that need to be addressed and in so doing will advance the fields of second language (L2) and third language (L3) acquisition in several important ways. Fundamental questions concerning multilingual development persist especially with respect to the role of Universal Grammar in this language…

This response argues against the proposal that novel utterances are formed by analogy with stored exemplars that are close in meaning. Strings of words that are similar in meaning or even identical can behave very differently once inserted into different syntactic environments. Furthermore, phrases with similar meanings but different underlying…

Exemplar-based learning requires: (1) a segmentation procedure for identifying the units of past experiences that a present experience can be compared to, and (2) a similarity function for comparing these past experiences to the present experience. This article argues that for a learner to learn a language these two mechanisms will require…

Data-driven learning uncontroversially plays a role in human language acquisition--how large a role is a matter of much debate. The success of artificial neural networks in NLP in recent years calls for a re-evaluation of our understanding of the possibilities for learning grammar from data alone. This dissertation argues the case for using…

In her keynote article advocating the Linguistic Proximity Model for third language (L3) acquisition, Westergaard (2021) presents several arguments against 'copying and restructuring' in nonnative language acquisition, mechanisms central to Schwartz and Sprouse's (1996) Full Transfer/Full Access model of second language (L2) acquisition. In this…

This commentary discusses the recent keynote article in "Second Language Research" by Westergaard (2021), which extends the Micro-cue Model to second language (L2) and third language (L3) acquisition. The commentary comments on such questions as: What makes a given property easy or hard to acquire? How do learners determine similarity?…

The syntactic behaviour of human beings cannot be explained by analogical generalization on the basis of concrete exemplars: analogies in surface form are insufficient to account for human grammatical knowledge, because they fail to hold in situations where they should, and fail to extend in situations where they need to. [For Ben Ambridge's…

Haugen's model (in "Sociolinguistics," Penguin, Harmondsworth, pp 97-111, 1972 [1966]) of standardisation has been widely adopted in general histories of particular languages, not least because of its clarity and simplicity. In this article, I focus on its treatment of codification, with a view to suggesting refinements to this part of…

In this commentary, I suggest that it may be helpful to think about the formidable problem space that Westergaard's (2021) Linguistic Proximity Model seeks to address at the three levels of analysis that Marr (1982) famously proposed are needed to understand any complex cognitive system. I argue that at the computational level of analysis, where…

This dissertation investigates how bilinguals use their two grammars to comprehend written intra-sentential codeswitches. I focus on adjective/noun constructions in Spanish and English where I manipulate the congruence of grammatical word order in the two languages across the codeswitch boundary. This allows me to test three codeswitching…

While language aptitude and motivation are considered to be important contributors to second language (L2) attainment, two major gaps in the past research have been (1) a lack of nonlinear models stemming from a naive and tacit assumption that learning outcomes are linearly related to their predictors, and (2) a lack of unified and integrative…

Ambridge reviews and augments an impressive body of research demonstrating both the advantages and the necessity of an exemplar-based model of knowledge of one's language. He cites three computational models that have been applied successfully to issues of phonology and morphology. Focusing on Ambridge's discussion of sentence-level constructions,…

The interaction between working memory and language processing is widely discussed in cognitive research. However, those studies often explore the relationship between language comprehension and working memory (WM). The role of WM is rarely considered in language production, despite some evidence suggesting a relationship between the two cognitive…