Virginia Valian is Distinguished Professor of psychology at CUNY Hunter College; she is also a member of the linguistics and psychology PhD Programs at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research on how children learn language supports theories of innate grammatical knowledge – particularly linguistic universals – and investigates the interaction of linguistic knowledge and higher cognitive processing. Her work has potential implications for artificial intelligence, particularly how LLMs are trained, how they generalize from training data, and their ability to represent variation and variability in language acquisition.
Talk
LLMs, POS, and UG | June 4
Sessions in which Virginia Valian participates
Tuesday 4 June, 2024
Is the goal of language acquisition research to account for children’s behavior (their productions and performance on tests of comprehension) or their knowledge? A first step in either goal is to establish facts about children’s linguistic behavior at the beginning of combinatorial speech. Recent work in our laboratory investigates children’s productions between roughly 15 and 22 months and suggests a combination of structured and less-structured utterances in which structured utterances come...