Computational Modeling

*Please note that this tutorial will be presented online only. We will provide a lecture hall for in-person conference attendees to participate in the session.

Computational models are an increasingly important tool in language acquisition research. They can help us describe the input, explain the learner’s behaviour, and explore the possible learning mechanisms in the child’s mind. On a practical level, computational experiments do not suffer the same constraints as empirical studies, allowing us to consider many different conditions.

This tutorial will offer a brief introduction to modelling, followed by a guided programming session. The goal is to simulate infants’ ability to find recurring patterns in speech, which is thought to be a fundamental ability for language learners. Numerous studies have been carried out on the topic, exploring the conditions under which infants can indeed detect recurring patterns. Can all the findings be explained with a single simple mechanism?

Participants will get hands-on experience with the use of the programming language Python, a high-level scripting language ideally suitable for both beginners and advanced scientific computing. At the end of the tutorial, participants will have built a working model and thus gained insight into the possibilities and limitations of computational modelling in child language research.