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Last Update: 06-21/2009 19:20 		Me at the top of Mount Floyen in Norway Having just completed a BA and an MA in Linguistics at the Ohio State University, I am preparing to begin study towards a PhD in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh this Fall. I am interested in understanding how children come to learn language through experience.

Specifically, I am interested in certain strong statements about linguistic theories that have been made on the basis of an argument called the ``Poverty of the Stimulus.'' This argument holds that the linguistic signal does not contain very much information about the structures it specifies, which would presumably mean that infants, who very apparently succeed in learning those structures, must come ``pre-programmed'' with strong expectations about what language is like. However, since the representations used in linguistic theories typically abstract away from the actual linguistic signal, it is far from clear just how poverty-stricken the stimulus might be.

To assess the information content of the linguistic signal, I have begun looking at the information conveyed by variation in the long-term statistical distribution of linguistic objects, and also by variation in the acoustic signal. Such techniques can demonstrate only, however, that particular sorts of variation are useful in principle for language learning. To fully understand the role of variation in language learning, I will test adults and children in a laboratory setting to see if they are in fact sensitive to informative sorts of variation.
—John Pate