Some research papers
(2019) Language acquisition
as the locus of change in the short-a system of Philadelphia.
(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) 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