Language Acquisition and Connectionism

What are the neural mechanisms underlying language acquisition and what characteristics of the linguistic input are critical to successful learning?

The articles in this volume show how connectionist models of language acquisition can illuminate these questions by exposing neural network architectures to structured linguistic input.

Examples from a wide variety of domains of language acquisition are covered, including the development of early speech perception, lexical and syllabic segmentation, noun and adjective acquisition, inflectional morphology, the development of spelling-sound correspondences and the acquisition of propositional knowledge.

The articles show how the mental representation of linguistic structure can emerge from the interaction of a structured environment with a linguistically naive neural network. The volume summarizes and extends the growing body of work that shows that developmental psycholinguistics have hitherto underestimated the structural regularities that can be extracted from the linguistic input to the child using general learning mechanisms.