Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition (PsychoCompLA-2007) William Gregory Sakas (sakas@hunter.cuny.edu) Department of Computer Science, Hunter College Ph.D. Programs in Linguistics and Computer Science, The Graduate Center City University of New York 695 Park Ave, New York, NY 10021 USA David Guy Brizan (dbrizan@gc.cuny.edu) Ph.D. Program in Computer Science, The Graduate Center City University of New York 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016 USA Keywords: language acquisition; syntax acquisition; language learning; language change; computational; linguistics; psycholinguistics; psychology; statistical; innateness. important question. One effective line of investigation is to computationally model the acquisition process and determine interrelationships between a model and linguistic or psycholinguistic theory, and/or correlations between a model's performance and data from linguistic environments that children are exposed to. Workshop Topic and History The workshop is devoted to psychocomputational models of language acquisition. By psychocomputational, we mean computational models that are compatible with research in psycholinguistics, developmental psychology and/or linguistics. Although there has been a significant amount of presented research targeted at modeling the acquisition of word categories, morphology and phonology, research aimed at modeling syntax acquisition has just begun to emerge. This is the third meeting of the Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition workshop following PsychoCompLA-2004, held in Geneva, Switzerland as part of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2004) and PsychoCompLA-2005 as part of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-2005) held in Ann Arbor, Michigan where the workshop shared a joint session with the Ninth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2005). Invited Presentations Statistical language learning: Computational and maturational constraints Elissa Newport, University of Rochester, USA The next challenges in unsupervised language acquisition: Dependencies and complex sentences Shimon Edelman, Cornell University, USA Learnable representations of languages: Something old and something new Alex Clark, Royal Holloway University of London, UK Workshop Description The workshop will present research and foster discussion centered around psychologically-motivated computational models of language acquisition, with an emphasis on the acquisition of syntax. In recent decades there has been a thriving research agenda that applies computational learning techniques to emerging natural language technologies and many meetings, conferences and workshops in which to present such research. However, there have been only a few (but growing number of) venues in which psychocomputational models of how humans acquire their native language(s) are the primary focus. Indirect evidence and the poverty of the stimulus Terry Regier, University of Chicago, USA Lexical learning and lexical diffusion Charles D. Yang, University of Pennsylvania, USA Bootstrapping bootstrapping Damir Cavar, Zadar University, Croatia and University of Indiana, USA Transformational networks Bob Frank, John Hopkins University, USA Psychocomputational models of language acquisition are of particular interest in light of recent results in developmental psychology that suggest that very young infants are adept at detecting statistical patterns in an audible input stream. Though, how children might plausibly apply statistical 'machinery' to the task of grammar acquisition, with or without an innate language component, remains an open and The great (Penn Treebank) robbery: When statistics is not enough Sandiway Fong, University of Arizona, USA, and Robert C. Berwick, MIT, USA (joint work with Partha Niyogi, University of Chicago, USA)