Computational Modeling

Tutorial Teacher: Meaghan Fowlie

Affiliation: Utrecht University

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.

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 modeling in language research.