Simulating basic structures and processes of first language acquisition

The vast amount of books recently published in the field of language acquisition cannot override the lack of a precisely formulated theoretical background.

There still exist presentations of observable processes without the awareness of the necessity of explanations. Theoretically oriented work concerning developmental psychology is still based on Piaget and, in linguistics, on Chomsky's generative language theory; alternatives remain rudimentary (e.g. connectionist models).

We think that knowledge in all disciplines that are directly involved in brain-research, has dramatically expanded compared to the knowledge Lenneberg could make use of. We now should try to systematically exploit this corpus of knowledge.

There are many basic concepts of language learning to be found in various publications of the BioMod-Group. Combining these concepts and constructing compound models of early language acquisition is expected to deliver new insights in this large and complex field of research.