Aarre Laakso

I am an all-around Cognitive Scientist -- my Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Philosophy from UCSD included a secondary concentration in Computer Science, and I am currently a postdoc in a Psychology lab doing what amounts to Computational Linguistics. Most of my programming these days is done in PythonLanguage and is related to analyzing and modeling child language acquisition.

http://www.laakshmi.com/aarre/

Child language acquisition is a very, very large subject; would you care to detail a bit more of your own interests and research in that area?

P.S. to onlookers: despite PleasePleaseDontCategorizeEveryPageOnWiki, exceptions are in fact a very major category, and I think Aarre's addition of CategoryException to these pages is helpful rather than hurtful, in this particular case. -- DougMerritt

Doug,

Thanks for the vote in favor of CategoryException.

As for my language acquistion research, I'm interested in the big questions (such as, "How do children learn all of the complexities of language, including subtle syntactic patterns, so rapidly and effortlessly?" and "Does that mean that knowledge of specific contingent facts about language , i.e., a LanguageAcquisitionDevice? in Chomsky's sense, must be innate?") but like most scientists, I am doing highly specialized research. I am trying to understand how 2-3 year olds learn the meanings of verbs. Working on the hypothesis that within-language cues might help, I have discovered through analysis of the CHILDES corpora (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/) that (a) pronouns are far and away the most common nouns in parental speech to young children, and (b) there are correlations between specific pronouns and certain broad classes of verb meanings. I am in the process of running some experiments with children to test the theory that children can use pronouns as cues to help them learn verbs. See my CV at http://www.laakshmi.com/aarre/cv/alaakso_cv.htm if you have the stomach to read some papers on this stuff.

Aarre

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