Reliable Learning by Unreliable Means: The Role of Prosodic and Phonological Cues in Syntax Acquisition Rick Dale Cornell University rad28@cornell.edu   It takes years for a child to learn the syntactic structure of her native language in its entirety. The complexity of the task, and the relative ease with which it is accomplished, have challenged psycholinguists to discover the nature of language acquisition and the learning that underlies it. Recent studies on infant sensitivity to the statistical properties of the environment suggest that statistical learning may be the entering wedge into syntax. In addition, there is a growing body of literature supporting the role of multiple-cue integration during language acquisition. I discuss two series of simulations exploring syntax acquisition by a statistical learning device (simple recurrent network; SRN). The first illustrates the role of multiple probabilistic cues in syntax acquisition by an SRN. Such cues as pauses, lexical stress, and word length may offer only partially reliable indication of language structure. When learned together, however, they actually enhance acquisition of grammatical structure. The second series investigates the emergence of these cues during language evolution. These evolutionary simulations demonstrate that growing vocabulary and grammatical structure induce cues with greater regularity and importance in languages. I discuss the relevance of multiple cues in statistical learning, and what implications they have for language acquisition. This work was done in collaboration with Morten H. Christiansen.   Back to main page