Understanding language change

social understanding and language

social interaction requires the ability to understand people’s mental states (their intentions, desires and believes). the ability for attributing mental states is called “theory of mind.” theory of mind leads the person to explain and predict behavior. researchers showed a great interest in the relation of language and mind/language and thought. some researchers focused on methodological conce...

Language acquisition is language change.

According to the theory of Universal Grammar, the primary linguistic data guides children through an innately specified space of hypotheses. On this view, similarities between child-English and adult-German are as unsurprising as similarities between cousins who have never met. By contrast, experience-based approaches to language acquisition contend that child language matches the input, with n...

Language Change and Language Contact

Language acquisition and language change.

Children acquire a mature language system and sometimes this system differs from that of their parents. This is a significant part of language change and understanding acquisition is key to understanding this kind of change in people's internal grammars. I outline one approach to language acquisition, based on children finding cues expressed in the input they are exposed to. This enables us to ...

Language understanding using hidden understanding models

We describe the rst sentence understanding system that is completely based on learned methods both for understanding individual sentences, and determinig their meaning in the context of preceding sentences. We describe the models used for each of three stages in the understanding: semantic parsing, semantic classi cation, and discourse modeling. When we ran this system on the last test (Decembe...