The Acquisition Process
Lisa Pearl
March 2025 

This chapter discusses the acquisition process, and how we build theories that explain how that marvelous process occurs in children. I review insights about the relevant factors in the acquisition process, and what we currently know about those factors. I draw on results from quantitative approaches to language acquisition that allow us to concretely articulate and evaluate potential acquisition theories, such as mathematical learnability and computational modeling. The insights gained from these approaches will hopefully allow us to construct a complete, elegant theory of syntactic language acquisition.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008777 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	To appear in The Cambridge Companion to Child Syntax
keywords:	acquisition process, mathematical learnability, computational modeling, computational cognitive modeling, large language models, acquisition theorizing, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [January 2025]
Downloaded:	184 times

 

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