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Morten H. Christiansen
Cornell University
University of Southern Denmark
Haskins Laboratories

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Language Acquisition as Learning to Process
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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.

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