Publication of Proceedings of Symposium on Syntactic Theory and First Language Acquisition

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ABSTRACT A symposium will bring together theorists in formal linguistics, researchers on the empirical phenomena of language acquisition and groups concerned with the computational problems of language acquisition. Several key topics that exemplify some of the most exciting current interactions between linguistics, psychology and computer science will be explored by leading researchers and theoreticians at all levels of career development. These topics include: knowledge of principles and parameters of phrase structure and configuration, knowledge of principles and parameters concerning types of anaphora, and formal and empirical approaches to learnability. In addition to helping promote advances in one of the most successful areas of cognitive science, this symposium also seeks to explore the nature of that success and its broader implications for cognitive science as a whole. The field of language acquisition research has begun to adopt a number of common assumptions that form a core set of methodological and explanatory guidelines that have proved to be extraordinarily successful as a research strategy across several disciplines. Since these general guidelines do not seem to be obviously dependent on unique properties of language, it is natural to ask how well they might work in other content domains. To that end the beginning session of the symposium will propose an initial characterization of those guidelines to be evaluated in terms of the specific research presentations that follow. The final session of the symposium will then revise those guidelines and then have leading researchers from different disciplines discuss possible extensions of the revised guidelines to other domains of cognition.