Human infants develop language remarkably rapidly and without overt instruction. We argue
that the distinctive ontogenesis of child language arises from the interplay of three factors …

The first part of this article gives a brief overview of the four levels of the Chomsky hierarchy,
with a special emphasis on context-free and regular languages. It then recapitulates the …

Scaling large language models (LLMs) leads to an emergent capacity to learn in-context
from example demonstrations. Despite progress, theoretical understanding of this …

Reading a sentence entails integrating the meanings of individual words to infer more
complex, higher-order meaning. This highly rapid and complex human behavior is known to …

Neurolinguistic accounts of sentence comprehension identify a network of relevant brain
regions, but do not detail the information flowing through them. We investigate syntactic …

For decades we have been using Chomsky's generative system of grammars, particularly
context-free grammars (CFGs) and regular expressions (REs), to express the syntax of …

First Published in 1999. Code switching is widely used in bilingual communities worldwide,
and has been found in government documents, literature, religious works, and song …

This work focuses on explaining both grammatical universals of word order and quantitative
word-order preferences in usage by means of a simple efficiency principle: dependency …

A word‐by‐word human sentence processing complexity metric is presented. This metric
formalizes the intuition that comprehenders have more trouble on words contributing larger …

The goal of this paper is to give a precise, formal account of certain fundamental notions in
minimalist syntax. Particular attention is given to the comparison of token‐based …