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MIT World » : The Computational Nature of Language Learning

Tags: decisionsystem, language, psychology, science, mit on 2008-06-02 -All Annotations (2) -About

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Niyogi believes that an “evolutionary trajectory” links how acquisition happens at an individual level, and how variation in language springs up from one generation to the next. But rather than inheriting the grammar of your parents, you have to learn it. Examining language variation over time as if it were genetic variation, “you get a different mathematical structure…and probabilities start playing an important role.” Small differences “can have very subtle consequences giving rise to bifurcation in nonlinear dynamics of evolution.” For instance, 1000 years ago, the English were speaking a language that’s unrecognizable to us today. How has it come to be that “we have moved so far from that point through learning which is mimicking the previous generation?”
Niyogi explains that within a single population two varying languages may be in competition (say, a German and an English-type grammar). While a majority may speak the dominant variant, some children will likely be exposed to a mixture of the two. There’s a “drift” in language use, “and suddenly, what was stable becomes unstable.”
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- Past posts in my blog also dealt with the evolution of language. I am wondering how this plays out in larger organizational and social systems and the interaction of different systems ie Americans in Iraq or other situations. Especially with the web accelerating communications even if it is not directly connected to everybody within a system.
  
  posted by brianddrpm on 2008-02-25 03:33:12