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A COMPUTATIONAL MODEL OF FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
by Nobuo Satake (University of Tokyo)
This book describes a study on the question of what sort of innate knowledge it is that enables children to acquire a first language. The author, using a computational approach, builds a model, named BUD (Bring Up a Daughter), on the basis of the data linguists and psychologists have collected.
BUD is based on the empirists, view of first language acquisition (as opposed to that of the nativists'), that children make a number of rules in acquiring a first language and that over generalizations can be found in the acquisition of every aspect of a language. Thus, BUD has no built-in procedure by which it computes the structures of a language. A detailed description of the BUD model and its workings answers the question on which the study is based.
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