Knowledge and Learning in Natural Language
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It is a simple observation that children make mistakes when they learn a language. Yet, to the trained eye, these mistakes are far from random; in fact, they closely resemble perfectly grammatical utterances by adults--who speak other languages. This type of error analysis suggests a novel view of language learning: children are born with a fixed set of hypotheses about language--Chomsky's Universal Grammar--and these hypotheses compete to match the child's ambient language in a Darwinian fashion. The book presents evidence for this perspective from the study of children's words and grammar, and how language changes over time.Reviews
"Yang's carefully crafted and impressively argued study is a significant contribution to the exciting field of language acquisition, and cognitive growth more generally. He has shown how conceptions of 'universal grammar' can be integrated with precise ideas about learning/growth mechanisms within a variational model of language acquisition that yields sharp and well-confirmed predictions over quite an interesting range, with implications for language change as well. It is a substantial achievement, sure to become the basis for much fruitful inquiry and research."--Noam Chomsky
"According to Yang, many of today's irregular verbs are historical survivors of what were once systematic rules ... By neglecting this historical evidence Pinker mistakenly supposes that the irregular cases have to be memorized on a case-by-case basis, whereas according to Yang what has to be memorized is which rule applies. Yang strengthens his argument by bringing in evidence from other languages. Yang argues that these irregular patterns are rule-based and that the child's task is not to memorize plurals on a word-by-word basis, but to figure out which rule applies, to which set the noun belongs. If Yang is right, and I think he is, then Pinker's irregulars are not illustrations of the words-and-rules thesis, but the less-general-rules-and-more-general-rules thesis."--John Searle, The New York Review of Books
"Who would have thought that there could be a synthesis of mathematical learning theory, natural selection and Universal Grammar that is both readable and convincing? Charles Yang has succeeded, and in the process illuminates many phenomena in child language that are perplexing under alternative accounts."--Jill de Villiers, Smith College
About the Author(s)
Charles Yang has been teaching computational linguistics and language acquisition at Yale since receiving his Ph.D. in computer science at MIT.
