Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST) has received considerable attention over the last decades, inspiring a number of second language acquisition studies. This article examines the research from a critical epistemological point of view, starting from the Greek philosopher Cratylus, who concluded that remaining silent is the only way to be…

Iterated learning models of language evolution have typically been used to study the emergence of language, rather than historical language change. We use iterated learning models to investigate historical change in the accent classes of two Korean dialects. Simulations reveal that many of the patterns of historical change can be explained as…

This article enters the debate about the complex and dynamical nature of second language acquisition (SLA) by discussing and commenting on Pallotti's critique of Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST). Pallotti's critique brings to the fore the argument that, due to its anti-reductionist stance, CDST research fails to observe three fundamental…

This commentary critiques Ambridge's radical exemplar model of language acquisition using research from the Longitudinal Study of Early Language, which has tracked the language development of 30+ children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) since 2002. This research has demonstrated that the children's capacity for abstraction at the grammatical…

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…

Adjuncts and arguments exhibit different syntactic behaviours, but modelling this difference in minimalist syntax is challenging: on the one hand, adjuncts differ from arguments in that they are optional, transparent, and iterable, but on the other hand they are often strictly ordered, reflecting the kind of strict selection seen in argument…

Ambridge argues that there is widespread agreement among child language researchers that learners store linguistic abstractions. In this commentary the authors first argue that this assumption is incorrect; anti-representationalist/exemplar views are pervasive in theories of child language. Next, the authors outline what has been learned from this…

Second language acquisition researchers often face particular challenges when attempting to generalize study findings to the wider learner population. For example, language learners constitute a heterogeneous group, and it is not always clear how a study's findings may generalize to other individuals who may differ in terms of language background…

We study the learnability problem concerning the dative alternations in English (Baker, 1979; Pinker, 1989). We consider how first language learners productively apply the double-object and to-dative constructions ("give the book to library"/"give the library the book"), while excluding negative exceptions ("donate 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…

Pieter Muysken's keynote paper, "Language contact outcomes as a result of bilingual optimization strategies", undertakes an ambitious project to theoretically unify different empirical outcomes of language contact, for instance, SLA, pidgins and Creoles, and code-switching. Muysken has dedicated a life-time to researching, rather…

The past two decades have shown an unexpected effectiveness of "Web-scale" data in natural language processing. Even the simplest models, when paired with unprecedented amounts of unstructured and unlabeled Web data, have been shown to outperform sophisticated ones. It has been argued that the effectiveness of Web-scale data has…

This chapter will present a research synthesis of a series of studies, termed here the Ealing research. The studies use the same general framework to conceptualise tasks and task performance, enabling easier comparability. The different studies, although each is self-contained, build into a wider picture of task performance. The major point of…

A model for adult language learning should integrate theories in language acquisition with theories about learnability and proposals about adult language structures. Two particular problems in language acquisition are examined: (1) establishing what counts as a formal relationship in a particular domain, and (2) retreating from overgeneralizations…