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…

Discusses the role connectionism plays in the development of cognitive theories and in the explanation of linguistic phenomena inherent in second language acquisition (SLA). Presents a critical look at some existing connectionist models of language functions with a focus on the need for a general cognitive model of SLA that integrates research in…

This paper describes the notation and underlying organization of an augmented, recursive-transition network grammar and illustrates how such a grammar is a natural medium for expressing and explaining a wide variety of facts about the psychological processes of sentence comprehension. A general discussion of transformational grammar and…

This document contains the reports summarizing the main discussion held during the March 1972 Computational Linguistics Conference. The first report, "Computational Linguistics and Linguistics," helps to establish definitions and an understanding of the scope of computational linguistics. "Integrated Computer Systems for Language" and…