Language as Skill

Language acquisition is often viewed as a problem of inference, in which children — like “mini-linguists” —  try to piece together the abstract grammar of their native language from incomplete and noisy input. This “language-as-knowledge” viewpoint contrasts with a more recent alternative, in which the challenge of language acquisition is practical, not theoretical: by practicing across myriads of social interactions, the child gradually learns to understand and produce language. Thus, language acquisition may be best construed as skill learning, on par with learning other complex human skills such as riding a bicycle or playing a musical instrument. In the CSL Lab, we explore key implications of this “language-as-skill” framework through both computational modeling and behavioral experiments. We currently focus on how constraints from the Now-or-Never Bottleneck shape acquisition, including requiring the learner to integrate all available information in the input so as to arrive at the right interpretation.