Language Evolution
I'm also interested in the link between constraints on human distributional learning and the types of structures that we see in natural language. A major motivation for this work is the observation that linguistic systems of the world, though differing on the surface, share deep similarities and vary in non-arbitrary ways. One hypothesis for why this is the case posits that the process of language learning is central to explaining cross-linguistic similarities. In this framework, language universals arise from language learning and processing constraints (e.g., Christiansen, 2004), and aspects of language structure that enhance a language's learnability are more likely to endure another generation of acquisition and transmission than those that do not. Experimentally varying the distributional information available to the learner in the input and testing the "learnability" of these artificial grammars should reveal considerable insight into this problem [Reeder, 2004: please email for a copy].