It is well-known that language is an window into the human mind, not just because our words reveal our thoughts, but because the way we put words together reflects principles of organization that allow creativity to flourish. Recent mathematically based research in linguistic theory has identified computational principles that promise to provide the software behind our neurological hardware. This workshop will bring together linguists, biologists, psychologists, philosophers and computer scientists who are discovering how these linguistic principles provide the abstract basis for language learning and learning in general. Central to this enterprise is a simple concept, recursion, the idea of building complex structures through repeated application of simple rules, which may provide a metaphor for the organization of all human action.
This workshop is timely because research on complex structures in language and cognition is now reaching a point where the various types of complexity can begin to be defined with sufficient precision to consolidate results and discover the sources and limits of complex human cognition. By identifying the ways in with complex structures and complex can arise from the application of simple rules, this research lays the foundation for new ways of designing curriculum for optimal learning, new perspectives on artificial intelligence and new insight into the evolutionary changes that distinguish animal cognition from human cognitive abilities.
