Some research papers
New
Testing the Tolerance
Principle: Children form productive rules when it is
more computationally efficient. With Kathryn Schuler
and Elissa Newport. (Submitted)
New The
distributional learning of recursive structures.
With Daoxin Li, Lydia Grohe, and Petra Schulz. Proceedings
of BUCLD 2021.
New
Learning
morphological productivity as meaning-form mappings.
With Sarah Payne and Jordan Kodner. Society for Computation
in Linguistics (2021)
New Saussurean
Rhapsody: Systematicity and arbitrariness in language.
Forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon.
New The
threshold of productivity and the “irregularization”
of verbs in Early Modern English. With Don
Ringe. Forthcoming in an edited volume from the 20th
International Conference on English Historical
Linguistics.
(2020) The abstractness of
determiners. (With Virginia Valian). Submitted.
(2020) Miller's
monkey updated: Communicative efficiency and the statistics of
words in natural language. (With Spencer Caplan and Jordan
Kodner). Submitted.
(2020) Modeling
morphological typology for unsupervised learning of language
morphology. (With Hongzhi Xu, Jordan Kodner, and Mitch
Marcus). ACL2020.
(2019) Using the Tolerance Principle to
predict phonological change. (With Betsy Sneller and Josef
Fruehwald). Language Variation and Change.
(2018) A user's
guide to the Tolerance Principle. For public
consumption.
(2018) 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.
(2018) How to
make the most out of very little. In honor of Lila
Gleitman. To appear in Topics in Cognitive Science.
(2018) Parameter
setting is feasible. (With William Sakas and Bob
Berwick). Theoretical Linguistics.
(2017) The growth of language: Universal
grammar, experience, and principles of efficient computation.
(With Stephen Crain, Robert Berwick, Noam Chomsky, and Johan
Bolhuis. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Review (special issue on
the biology of language)
(2017) How
to wake up irregular (and speechless). In Bowern, Horn,
Zanuttini (eds.) On looking into words (and beyond). (Tribute
to Stephen R.
Anderson, who gave me my first linguistics job.)
(2017) When nobody wins
With Kyle Gorman.
To appear in Franz Rainer, Francesco Gardani, Hans Christian
Luschützky and Wolfgang U. Dressler (ed)., Competition in
inflection and word formation. Dordrecht: Springer. (This
paper refines and extends some analyses of paradigmatic gaps
in POP
and supercedes the earlier 2012 work below with Preys and
Browczyk.
(2016) Learning datives: The
Tolerance Principle in L1 and L2 acquisition.
(With Silvina Montrul). Second Language Research.
(2016) Testing the Tolerance
Principle: Children form productive rules when it is
more computationally efficient to do so. (With
Kathryn Schuler and Elissa Newport). Cogsci society
meeting.
(2016) The pursuit of
word meanings. (With Jon Stevens, Lila
Gleitman, and John Trueswell). In press in Cognitive
Science.
(2017) Rage
against the machine: Evaluation Metrics in the
21st century. To appear in Language
Acqusition.
(2017) Statistical
evidence that a child can create a
combinatorial linguistic system without
linguistic input: Implications for language
evolution. (With Susan Goldin-Meadow)
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Review (special
issue on the biology of language)
(2016) The
linguistic origin of the next number. Ms.
(Slides
from the workshop
where the work was conceived.)
(2015) Input
and its structural description.In 50
years later: Reflections on Chomsky's Aspects.
(With Julie Anne Legate and Allison Ellman)
(2015) Negative
knowledge from positive evidence.
Language
(2015)
For and
against frequencies. Comments on
Ambridge et al. J. Child Language
(2014)
Hauser, M.D.; Yang, C.; Berwick, R.;
Tattersall, I.; Ryan, M.; Watumull, J.;
Chomsky, N.; Lewontin, R. The
mystery of language evolution.
Frontiers in Language Science.
(2014). Richie, R, Yang, C. &
Coppola, M. Modeling
the Emergence of Lexicons in Homesign
Systems. Topics in Cognitive
Science: 6, 183-195.
(2013)
Recursive
misrepresentations: Reply to
Levinson (2013, Language). (With
Julie Anne Legate & David
Pesetsky). To appear in
Language.
(2013) Who's
afraid of George Kingsley Zipf?
Significance: The Magazine of the
Royal Statistical Society and the
American Statistical Soceity. Dec.
29-34.
(2013) Ontogeny
and Phylogeny of Language. PNAS.
(2013) Modeling the
Emergence of Lexicons in Homesign
Systems. (With Russell Richie
& Marie Coppola). Journal version to
appear in Topics in Cognitive Science. Winner of
the best computational modeling paper
at 2013 Cognitive Science Society
meeting (Berlin)
(2013) The
pursuit of word meanings. (With
Jon Stevens, Lila Gleitman and John
Trueswell). Manuscript; comments
welcome.
(2012) Assessing
child and adult grammar. In
Berwick & Piattelli-Palmarini
(Eds.) Rich Languages from Poor Inputs.
Oxford: Oxford University Press. (With Julie Anne Legate)
Longer version can be
downloaded here.
(2012) Productivity
and paradigmatic gaps. Slides from
NELS2012 at CUNY. Joint work with Kyle
Gorman, Jennifer Preys, and Margaret
Browczyk.
(2012)
Input and Universal Grammar.
Slides from an invited talk at the
Second Language Research Forum (SLRF) at
CMU. A tutorial that
emphasizes how input effects in language
learning are compatible with, and
in fact favor, Universal Grammar based
approaches to language acquisition.
Materials are drawn from my various
previous writings.
(2012) Verb
islands in adult and child language.
BUCLD Proceedings from the 2011 meeting.
(With Alix Kowalski). Prefinal version.
(2011) Usage
unevenness in child language supports
grammar productivity. BU
Conference on Language Development.
(2011)
A statistical test for grammar.
ACL CMCL Portland (condensed version of
the 2009 ms). Slides from
the talk
(2011)
Computational models of syntactic
acquisition.. (In
press) WIRE Interdiscriplinary Review:
Cognitive Science.
(2009) Three
factors in language variation. Lingua
special issue on language variation.
(2009) Review
of Finite State Morphology. (With
Erwin Chan). Word Structure. 1:2, 245-254.
(2008) The
great number crunch. Journal
of Linguistics. 44, 205-228.
(2007) Morphosyntactic
learning and the development of tense.
(With J.A.Legate). A new approach to
Root Infinitives. Language
Acquisition 315-344.
(2006) Word
segmentation: Quick but not dirty
(with T. Gambell). Manuscript, Yale
University.
More complete writeup of
the 2004 TICS paper part I: nobody seems
to care about part II.
(2005) The
origin of linguistic irregularity.
In Wang and Minett (Eds.) Language
acquisition, change, and evolution. Talk from 2001.
(2005) On
productivity. Yearbook
of Language Variation, 5,
333-370.
(2005) The
richness of the poverty of the
stimulus. (With J.A.Legate). On
the occasion of
Happy Golden Anniversary,
Generative Syntax: 50 years since Logical
Structure of Linguistic Theory.
(2004) Universal
Grammar, statistics, or both. Trends in
Cognitive Sciences. 451-456.
(2002) Empirical
reassessment of the poverty stimulus
argument. (With J.A.Legate). Linguistic
Review, 19, 151-162.
(2001) Internal
and external forces in language change.
Language
Variation and Change. 12,
231-250.
(2000) Dig-dug,
think-thunk. Review of Steven Pinker's
Words
and Rules: The ingredients of
language. London Review of
Books.
(1999)
Estimation of software reliability by
stratified sampling.. ACM
Transactions on Software Engineering
and Methodology. 8, 263-283.
(1999)
Unordered merge and its linearization.
Syntax.
2, 38-64.
(1993)
Partition test, stratified sampling,
and cluster analysis. ACM SIGSOFT
Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGSOFT
symposium on Foundations of software
engineering.
I did my graduate work with Bob
Berwick and Noam
Chomsky in the MIT
AI Lab, an incredibly fun place. I
then took up a faculty position in
linguistics and psychology at Yale. I
moved to Penn in 2006 to join a uniquely
interdisciplinary community for language
and cognitive science (RIP)
research.
Recent Ancient
scholarly activities (invited talks)
2009
Dec. Workshop in the memory of
Carol Chomsky. MIT.
Oct. Center for Language &
Speech Processing (CLSP), Johns
Hopkins.
Sept. Input & syntactic
acquisition workshop. UC Irvine.
Aug. Plenary lecture. XIXth
International Conference on
Historical Linguistics.
Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
May. Workshop on recursion in
language and cognition. UMass
Amherst.
May. 20 hour lectures in
language acquisition. Graduate
school of linguistics. The
Basque Country.
Jan. The Schultink lecture.
Holland Graduate School of
Linguistics. Groningen. The
Netherlands.
Jan. 5 lectures on the
mechanisms of language
acquisition. LOT Winter School.
Groningen. The Netherlands.
2008
Dec. CUNY Graduate Center.
Oct.
Ikerbasque lecture. The
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, the
Basque Country.
July. Workshop on linguistic
interface. International
congress of linguistics. Seoul.
June. Workshop on artificial
language learning and
computational models. Utrecht,
the Netherlands.
June. Workshop on frequency
effects in language acquisition.
Wuppertal, Germany.
May. Workshop on productivity
and grammar. Tufts.
April. Workshop on
morphosyntactic variation. UMass
Amherst
April Bard College.
Feb. Princeton.
Feb. NYU.
Jan. Chicago.
2007
Dec. Origin of man and language
Workshop. European Science
Foundation. Rome.
Nov. Utrecht University, the
Netherlands
Nov. Empirical
methods
in language acquisition
research (EMLAR)
Nov. Il Dono Infinito. Festival
della Scienza. Genoa.
Oct. Workshop on
statistics and syntax. MIT.
Oct. UMass, Amherst.
Aug. Workshop on models of
language acquisition. Cog Sci
Society Annual Meeting,
Nashville, TN.
June. IRCS undergraduate
workshop. Penn.
June. Workshop on language
variation. Venice.
May. Workshop on syntactic
variation. York.
April. Cornell.
Feb. Panel on models of language
change. Penn Linguistics
Colloquium.
Erdos number: <=4