Commentary published In: Epistemological issue with keynote article “A Formalist Perspective on Language Acquisition” by Charles Yang
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 8:6] 2018
► pp. 733–737
Commentary
Mechanistic formal approaches to language acquisition
Yes, but at the right level(s) of resolution
Published online: 26 November 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.18050.gri
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.18050.gri
References (13)
Ambridge, B., Theakston, A. L., Lieven, E. V. M., & Tomasello, M. (2006). The distributed learning effect for children’s acquisition of an abstract syntactic construction. Cognitive Development, 21(2), 174–193.
Christiansen, M. H. & Chater, N. (2016). Creating language: integrating evolution, acquisition, and processing. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Ellis, N. C. (2006). Language acquisition as rational contingency learning. Applied Linguistics, 27(1), 1–24.
(2016). Cognition, corpora, and computing: triangulating research in usage-based language learning. Language Learning, 67(51), 40–65.
Ellis, N. C., Römer, U., & O’Donnell, M. B. (2016). Usage-based approaches to language acquisition and processing. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.
Gries, St. Th. (2008). Dispersions and adjusted frequencies in corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 13(4), 403–437.
. (2018). Operationalizations of domain-general mechanisms cognitive linguists often rely on: a perspective from quantitative corpus linguistics. In S. Engelberg, H. Lobin, K. Steyer, & S. Wolfer (Eds.), Wortschätze: Dynamik, Muster, Komplexität (pp. 75–90). Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter.
Gries, St. Th. & Ellis, N. C. (2015). Statistical measures for usage-based linguistics. Language Learning, 65(Supplement 1), 1–28.
Pine, J. M., Freudental, D., Krajewskyi, G., & Gobet, F. (2013). Do young children have adult-like syntactic categories? Zipf’s law and the case of the determiner. Cognition, 127(3), 345–360.
Smith, N. J. & Levy, R. (2013). The effect of word predictability on reading time is logarithmic. Cognition, 128(3), 302–319.
Tomasello, M. & Stahl, D. (2004). Sampling children’s spontaneous speech: how much is enough? Journal of Child Language, 31(1), 101–121.
Yang, C. (2018). A formalist perspective on language acquisition. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 8(6), 665–706.
Cited by (7)
Cited by seven other publications
Enger, Hans-Olav
Bayram, Fatih, Grazia Di Pisa, Jason Rothman & Roumyana Slabakova
Rastelli, Stefano
Rastelli, Stefano
[no author supplied]
[no author supplied]
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
