One model for the learning of language
Yuan Yang, Steven T. Piantadosi · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022
Significance It has long been hypothesized that language acquisition may be impossible without innate knowledge of the structures that occur in natural language. Here, we show that a domain general learning setup, originally developed in cognitive psychology to model rule learning, is able to acquire key pieces of natural language from relatively few examples of sentences. This develops a new approach to formalizing linguistic learning and highlights some features of language and language acquisition that may arise from general cognitive processes.