Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition

Questions related to language acquisition have been of interest for many centuries, as children seem to acquire a sophisticated capacity for processing language with apparent ease, in the face of ambiguity, noise and uncertainty. However, with recent advances in technology and cognitive-related research it is now possible to conduct large-scale computational investigations of these issues.

Language Learning.- T.Poibeau, A.Villavicencio, A.Korhonen and A.Alishahi.- Part I Methods and Tools for Investigating Phonetics and Phonology.- Phon: A Computational Basis for Phonological Database Building and Model Testing. Y.Rose, G. J. Hedlund, R.Byrne, T.Wareham, and B.MacWhinney.- Language Dynamics in the Framework of Complex Networks: A Case Study on Self-organization of the Consonant Inventories. A.Mukherjee, M.Choudhury, N.Ganguly, and A.Basu.- Part II Classifying Words and Mapping them to Meanings.- From Cues to Categories: A Computational Study of Children's Early Word Categorization. F.Torabi Asr, A.Fazly, and Z.Azimifar.- In Learning Nouns and Adjectives Remembering Matters: a Cortical Model. A.Plebe, V.M.De la Cruz and M.Mazzone.- Part III Learning Morphology and Syntax.- Treebank Parsing and Knowledge of Language. S.Fong, I.Malioutov, B.Yankama, and R.C.Berwick.- Rethinking the Syntactic Burst in Young Children. C.Parisse.- Part IV Linking Syntax to Semantics.- Learning to Interpret Novel Noun-Noun Compounds: Evidence from Category Learning Experiments. B.J.Devereux and F.J.Costello.- Child Acquisition of Multiword Verbs: A Computational Investigation. A.Nematzadeh, A.Fazly, and S.Stevenson.- Starting from Scratch in Semantic Role Labeling: Early Indirect Supervision.- M.Connor, C.Fisher and D.Roth.- Gradual Acquisition of Verb Selectional Preferences in a Bayesian Model. A.Alishahi and S.Stevenson.- References.- Glossary.- Index.