The focus

This workshop hopes to explore the relationship between the input children receive and the eventual knowledge speakers attain. Every theory of language acquisition requires the input to play a causal role in the attainment of syntactic knowledge, but theories vary in the exact nature of this causal role - ranging from those with minimal linguistic presuppositions about the form of possible knowledge to those with very rich presuppositions.  Given this goal, we expect talks on a variety of topics, such as:

  • data/studies that favor/disfavor the need for prior linguistic knowledge
  • the importance/influence of different data distributions on the trajectory of acquisition
  • comparisons of different theories of grammar acquisition based on empirical data
  • interesting syntactic phenomena that may be fruitful avenues to explore for addressing claims of prior knowledge

The inspiration

The workshop stems from the grant "Testing the Universal Grammar Hypothesis", written by Lisa Pearl and Jon Sprouse, and is supported by the National Science Foundation. One of the most controversial (set of) claims in linguistic theory is that the data available to children during the language learning process underdetermines the language eventually attained, and that the solution to this induction problem is domain-specific innate knowledge (the Universal Grammar (UG) hypothesis). Recent debates in the language learning literature have questioned both the existence of induction problems and the possibility of ever falsifying the UG hypothesis. Lisa and Jon proposed a specific methodology for quantifying the induction problems faced by children during language learning, and empirically testing the UG hypothesis.

All of the talks at ISA 2009 are invited presentations of approximately 30 minutes followed by 25 minutes of discussion. We hope this format will stimulate discussion. You can find the titles of our speakers' presentations here, and more detailed information on the schedule page, including presentation slides and an audio recording of the presentation from consenting speakers. We are very excited to have speakers with a variety of backgrounds and viewpoints.

Kamil Ud Deen, University of Hawai'i at Manoa

"Binding Beyond the Input"

Anne Hsu, University of California, Berkeley

"Quantitative analysis of the problem of no negative evidence in Language Acquisition"

Jeff Lidz, University of Maryland

"Selective Statistical Learning"

Julian Pine, University of Liverpool

"Simulating the developmental pattern of finiteness marking in English, Dutch, German, French and Spanish using MOSAIC"

Terry Regier, University of Chicago

"Language acquisition and the poverty of the stimulus"

William Sakas, City University of New York

"Disambiguating Syntactic Triggers"

Charles Yang, University of Pennsylvania

"On Usage and Grammar"

Registration is Free
  • This workshop is free and open to all. However, we would like a headcount for preparation purposes, so if you are planning to attend, please take a moment to fill out the following fields:

Contact Info
Lisa Pearl & Jon Sprouse
3151 Social Science Plaza Irvine, CA 92697
Email: email Lisa, email Jon
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