The appeal of P&P

[Lara Taylor]

Andreas -

I don't know if this is quite what you have in mind, but Jeff Elman (from
the CogSci department here at UCSD) has a book out with Kim Plunkett,
called "Rethinking Innateness".  I believe they use 'simple recurrent
networks' (a type of neural net) to show that the patterns in language can
be learned without any innate "hardwired" knowledge of language.

I haven't actually read the book, but there's a paper on Jeff's website
called "A Connectionist Simulation of the Empirical Acquisition of
Grammatical Relations", written with Bill Morris and Gary Cottrell,
which also challenges the innateness hypothesis.  There are some other
papers on the website as well, but this most recent one is directly
related to language learning.

Try this website:

http://crl.ucsd.edu:80/%7Eelman

Best regards,
Lara

----------------
Lara M. Taylor
http://www.ling.ucsd.edu/~ltaylor