Despite the significant impact of the lexical approach for vocabulary learning, its classroom implementation has not been uniform. While related activities share the common Observe-Hypothesize-Experiment (OHE) elements, practitioners and researchers do not highlight how language input from the observing stage is turned into output and at what…

Data-driven learning uncontroversially plays a role in human language acquisition--how large a role is a matter of much debate. The success of artificial neural networks in NLP in recent years calls for a re-evaluation of our understanding of the possibilities for learning grammar from data alone. This dissertation argues the case for using…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are a powerful type of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that simulates how humans organize language and are able to interpret, predict, and generate text. This allows for contextual understanding of natural human language which enables the LLM to understand conversational human input and respond in a natural manner. Recent…

Syntactic structures are unobserved theoretical constructs which are useful in explaining a wide range of linguistic and psychological phenomena. Language acquisition studies how such latent structures are acquired by human learners through many hypothesized learning mechanisms and apparatuses, which can be genetically endowed or of general…

Digital media and electronic toys are changing the landscape of childhood. How does this change impact language learning? In this chapter, we explore potential alignment between six established principles of language and children's engagement with digital media and electronic toys. We argue that electronic toys and digital media are not solely…

We introduce a set of biologically and computationally motivated design choices for modeling the learning of language, or of other types of sequential, hierarchically structured experience and behavior, and describe an implemented system that conforms to these choices and is capable of unsupervised learning from raw natural-language corpora. Given…