====================================================================== Morten H. Christiansen Cornell University University of Southern Denmark Haskins Laboratories ====================================================================== Language Acquisition as Learning to Process ====================================================================== Abstract: Language happens in the here-and-now. If the linguistic input is not processed immediately, nothing can be learned from it. To successfully deal with the continual deluge of linguistic information, the brain must compress and recode the input as rapidly as possible. As a consequence, incoming language incrementally gets recoded into chunks of decreasing granularity, from sounds to constructions and beyond. Thus, units at different levels of linguistic analysis come for free as a consequence of the transient nature of language. The specific units change during development as the child learns to use language. To illustrate, I present results from a recent chunk-based computational model of early syntactic acquisition. I conclude that the immediacy of language processing provides a fundamental constraint on accounts of language acquisition, implying that acquisition involves learning to process, rather than inducing a grammar. ======================================================================