Understanding how the human mind creates the intricate system of syntactic structure that underlies human language has long been a central question in cognitive science. A complete theory of the cognitive architecture scaffolding this complex process needs to specify at least three components: (i) the input children use to learn their language's syntax, (ii) the gradient adult syntactic behavior that serves as the target state for learning, and (iii) the learning mechanism that children use to map between the input and the target state. The field is closer than ever to constructing its first set of large-scale theories because both the computational and experimental methodologies necessary to specify these components are now available to researchers willing to combine their expertise.
This project leverages a research framework that integrates realistic data about children's input, experimental syntax techniques, and computational modeling approaches to explain how children successfully acquire knowledge of multiple syntactic phenomena. The goal is to integrate the successful learning strategies for several complex syntactic phenomena into a cohesive theory of syntactic acquisition, identifying what the necessary elements of each strategy are and how children would know to utilize these strategy elements in just the right way. This represents a major advance for theoretical linguistics, developmental linguistics, and the broader psycholinguistics community, as it connects theoretical and experimental work in linguistics with computational modeling to yield broader insights than ever before.
This project provides an empirical foundation for studies of syntactic acquisition and a template for future projects that involve a coordinated synthesis of theory, experimentation, and computation. In addition, it provides hands-on research experience in theoretical linguistics to multiple undergraduate students and a graduate student each year, giving them access to professors engaged in highly relevant research that promises to have a significant impact on the field.
