Charles Yang Department of Linguistics, Computer Science, and Psychology Integrated Language Science and Technology University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104 Email: charles-dot-yang❂ling_dot_upenn-dot-edu Email for cogsci advising:  sas-cogs-pd@sas.upenn.edu Office: 3401 Walnut 315C Phone: 215-898-7849

Bio

I studied computer science at the MIT AI Lab. After a few years at Yale, I now teach linguistics, computer science, and psychology while directing the Program in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania. I work on language acquisition, variation, and change, natural language processing (NLP), and am boardly interested in the study of the mind including, more recently, numerical and conceptual development in children. I have written several books: The Price of Linguistic Productivity: How Children Learn to Break the Rules of Language (MIT Press 2016) won the Leonard Bloomfield Award from the Linguistic Society of America. I have received fellowships from the National Science Foundation (1995) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2018). 

Penn has a long and distinguished history of interdisciplinary linguistic research and can legitimately lay claims to the birthplace of modern theoretical, quantitative, psychological, and computational studies of language. We have launched a new initiative on Integrated Language Science and Technology, which I am co-directing with John Trueswell.

Cognitive Science Majors

Note to COGS students. I am on academic leave for the year 2024. Please direct advising queries to Dr. Russel Richie, the Associate Director of the Program. I will still participate in various COGS activities but will not hold office hours (zoom).



Books



Language acquisition: A slim guide (and a simple theory). (Oxford, forthcoming)

2017 (Eds. with Norbert Hornstein, Howard Lasnik, and Pritty Patel-Grosz) Syntactic Structures 60 Years On: The Impact of Chomsky's revolution in linguistics. Mouton. 

2009. (Ed.) Critical concepts in language acquisition. Routledge.

Publications



New Phonological Regularity and Breakdown. An Account of Vowel Length Leveling in Middle English. In Eska et al. (Eds). The Method Works. Palgrave. 237-259. 2024.

New Evaluating the existence proof: LLMs as cognitive models of language acquisition. In Mendivil (Ed.) Artificial Knowledge of Language. Forthcoming. 2024. Substantially revised from the GENBENCH paper below.

Evaluating Neural Language Models as Cognitive Models of Language Acquisition. With Héctor Javier Vázquez Martínez, Annika Lea Heuser, and Jordan Kodner. GENBENCH@EMNLP 2023.

The design of child language. (2023) A short note written to be translated in a Chinese literary magazine.

 
A user's defense of the Tolerance Principle.  (2023) Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur.


Making good on BADS.  (2023) Italian Journal of Linguistics. With Sarah Payne.


Another model not for the learning of language. (Remarks on a recent PNAS article on language learning). With Jordan Kodner and Spencer Caplan. (2022)


Distributional learning of syntactic categories.  BUCLD proceedings. With Kevin Liang and Diana Marsala. (2022)


The threshold of productivity and the “irregularization” of verbs in Early Modern English. With Don Ringe. In Los et al. (Eds). English historical linguistics: Change in structure and meaning. (2022)

The Greedy and Recursive Search for Morphological Productivity. With Caleb Belth, Sarah Payne, Deniz Beser, and Jordan Kodner. (CogSci 2021)

  Memory Constraints on Cross Situational Word Learning. With Christine Soh (CogSci 2021) Pursuit updated: now (essentially) parameter free!
 
The distributional learning of recursive structures. With Daoxin Li, Lydia Grohe, and Petra Schulz. Proceedings of BUCLD 2021.

Miller's Monkey Updated: Communicative Efficiency and the Statistics of Words in Natural Language. With Spencer Caplan and Jordan Kodner. Cognition (2020)  Demo here.


A Language Log interview in which I discuss some aspects of my work.  In Memoriam: Richard (Dick) Lewontin

A user's guide to the Tolerance Principle.

Generalization and probability matching. Matching is one of the most widely documented probabilistic behavior but the animal must be able to identify the discrete choices first before the actual matching can take place. A note on how this is done in language with potential applications to other domains (written in 2015).
         
Special issue of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism. My target article "A formalist perspective on language acquisition", commentaries by Theresa Biberauer, Cécile De Cat, Laura Domínguez and Jorge González Alonso, Christine Dimroth, Adele E. Goldberg, Stefan Th. Gries, Vsevolod Kapatsinski, Jeffrey Lidz and Laurel Perkins, Silvina A. Montrul, Johanne Paradis, Tom Roeper, Jason Rothman and Noam Chomsky, Caroline F. Rowland, Roumyana Slabakova, Peter Svenonius, Eva Wittenberg and Ray Jackendoff, and Noriaki Yusa, and my reply.

A blog post on the Tolerance Principle by José-Luis Mendívil.
     
Representation of Asians in Linguistics

Professional advice from my friend David Evans @UVa.

Advice on how to give talks from one of my mentors and dissertation committee member Patrick Henry Winston.

Collaborators over the years:

Bob Berwick, Caleb Belth,  Johan Bolhuis, Spencer Caplan, Andrea Ceolin, Erwin Chan, Noam Chomsky, Marie Coppola, Stephen Crain, Aletheia Cui, John Frampton, Josef Fruehwald, Tim Gambell, Lila Gleitman, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Kyle Gorman, Lydia Grohe, Sam Gutmann, Marc Hauser, Morris Halle, Ava Irani, Jordan Kodner, Dick Lewontin, Bill Labov, Alexander LaTourrette,  Daoxin Li, Kevin Liang, Thomas H.-T. Lee, Margaret Lei,  Julie Anne Legate, Constantine Lignos, Mitch Marcus, Diana Marsala, Silvina Montrul, Elissa Newport, Sarah Payne, David Pesetsky, Andy Podgurski, Russell Richie, Caitlin Richter, Don Ringe, Tom Roeper, William Sakas, Gillian Sankoff, Kathryn Schuler, Petra Schulz, Betsy Sneller, Christine Soh, Jon Stevens, Carola Trips, John Trueswell, Virginia Valian, and Hongzhi Xu.

In Memoriam: Morris Halle

In Memoriam: Tony Kroch

In Memoriam: Lila Gleitman

In Memoriam: Dick Lewontin