The Puzzle of Language Acquisition

About these Caroline Rowland lecture notes

These notes approach language acquisition as both an empirical and computational problem. They examine what children learn, how frequency, multimodal cues, and social interaction shape development, and how competing theories explain grammar and vocabulary growth.

• Sounds, words, grammar, and communicative development
• Word–referent mapping, multimodal cues, and social interaction
• Input frequency and cross-linguistic variation
• Inductive biases, grammar emergence, and poverty of stimulus
• Working memory, chunking, and computational models