CUNY Colag Publications

Publications & Presentations

Sakas W.G., Berwick, R.C. and Yang, C. D. (2018) Parameter setting is feasible. Linguistic Analysis. pre-publication pdf

Fodor, J.D. and Sakas, W.G. (2017) Learnability. Oxford Handbook of Universal Grammar. pre-publication pdf

Howitt, K., Lancaster, M. and Sakas, W.G. (2017) Doing away with defaults: the Parametric Gradient Hypothesis. Poster presented at BUCLD 42. Boston, November 3-5. abstract ppt

Sakas, W.G. (2016) Computational Approaches to Parameter Setting. Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics. pre-publication pdf

Fodor, J.D. (2013) Lecture Notes, Theoretical Aspects of Language Acquisition, NY-St. Petersburg Institute of Linguistics, Cognition & Culture, St. Petersburg Russia, Summer 2013 (ppt files). Class 1: Origins and Issues; Class 2: Computational Models; Class 3: Poverty of the Negative Stimulus; Class 4: Missing Positive Evidence; Class 5: Subset Principle; Class 6: Unambiguous Triggers; Class 7: Detecting Triggers; Class 8: Implications

Fodor, J.D. and Kam, X.N.C. (2013) Children's acquisition of syntax: Simple models are too simple. Rich Languages from Poor Inputs. Oxford University Press, UK, pp 43-60. pre-publication pdf

Sakas, W.G. and Fodor, J.D. (2012) Disambiguating Syntactic Triggers. Language Acquisition 19. pre-publication pdf

Sakas, W.G. and Fodor, J.D. (2012) Generating CoLAG Languages using the 'Supergrammar'. Unpublished technical report. pdf

Kam, X.C. (2009) Contributions of Statistical Induction to Models of Syntax Acquisition. Ph.D. thesis, The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Hoskey, A. (2008) Psychocomputational Models of Subset Principle Compliance in Simulated Language Learning. Ph.D. thesis, The Graduate Center, City University of New York. pdf

Kam, X. C., Stoyneshka, I., Tornyova, L. , Fodor J. D. and Sakas W. G. (2008) Bigrams and the richness of the stimulus, Cognitive Science 32(4). pdf An extended manuscript is available on the Linguistics in the Big Apple website here.

Fodor, J.D., Sakas, W.G. and Hoskey, A. (2007) Implementing the Subset Principle in syntax acquisition: Lattice-based models. In Proceedings of the Second European Cognitive Science Conference (EuroCogSci-2007). pdf

Sakas, W.G., Fodor, J.D. (2007) . Ideal language learning and the spychological resource problem. Workshop presentation: Where does Syntax come from? Have we all been Wrong? MIT. ppt video

Fodor, Janet Dean (2006) Syntax acquisition: an evaluation measure after all? Paper presented at the conference Of Minds and Language: An Encounter with Noam Chomsky, The University of the Basque Country, Donostia - San Sebastian, Spain, June 2006. To appear in a volume edited by M. Piatelli Palmerini and P. Salaburu, Oxford University Press (non-final draft). pdf

Sakas, W.G. (2006) The Subset Principle: Consequences and Conspiracies. Mayfest 2006, University of Maryland, May 2006. ppt abstract

Fodor, J.D. and Sakas, W.G. (2005) The Subset Principle in Syntax: Costs of Compliance. Journal of Linguistics 41, 513-569. pdf

Kam, X. C., Stoyneshka, I., Tornyova, L. , Fodor J. D. and Sakas W. G. (2005) Statistics vs. UG in language acquisition: Does a bigram analysis predict auxiliary inversion? Presented at the 2nd meeting of the Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition Workshop (PsychocompLA-2005). pdf

Fodor, J.D. and Sakas, W.G. (2004) Evaluating Models of Parameter Setting. Keynote paper. In proceedings of the 28th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 1-27. pdf ppt

Sakas, W.G. (2003) A Word-Order Database for Testing Computational Models of Language Acquisition, In the proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-2003). pdf

Sakas, W.G. and Fodor, J.D. (2003) Slightly Ambiguous Triggers for Syntactic Parameter Setting, The 9th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLAP-2003), Glasgow, 20-22 August, 2001. pdf

Sakas, W.G. and Nishimoto, E. (2002) Search, Structure or Statistics? A Comparative Study of Memoryless Heuristics for Syntax Acquisition, Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ. pdf abstract

Fodor, J.D. (2001) Setting syntactic parameters. In M. Baltin and C. Collins (eds.) The Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Theory, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK.

Sakas, W.G. and Fodor, J.D. (2001a) The Structural Triggers Learner . In S. Bertolo (ed.) Language Acquisition and Learnability , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK. pdf

Sakas, W.G. and Fodor, J.D. (2001b) Learning-Relevant Properties of Natural Language, The 7th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLAP-2001), Saarbrücken, 20-22 September, 2001. abstract

Fodor, J. D. and Teller, V. (2000) Decoding syntactic parameters: The superparser as oracle. Paper presented at Cognitive Science Society, Philadelphia, August 2000. pdf

Sakas, W.G. (2000a) Ambiguity and the Computational Feasibility of Syntax Acquisition, PhD thesis, The Graduate Center, City University of New York. abstract (html) all (pdf) conclusion section (pdf).

Sakas, W.G. (2000b) Modeling the Effect of Cross-language Ambiguity on Human Syntax Acquisition. Proceedings of the joint meeting of the 4th Computational Natural Language Learning Workshop (CoNLL-2000) 2nd Learning Language in Logic Workshop and 5th International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference. Association of Computational Linguistics, New Brunswick, NJ. pdf ppt

Fodor, J. D. (1998a) Unambiguous triggers. Linguistic Inquiry 29, 1-36. pdf

Fodor, J. D. (1998b) Parsing to learn. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 27.3, 339-374. pdf

Sakas, W.G. and Fodor, J.D. (1998) Setting the First Few Syntactic Parameters – A Computational Analysis. Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ. pdf

Sakas, W.G. and Fodor, J.D. (1997) Triggering, Hill-Climbing and the Conservative Learner: Can a stochastic trigger-based learner afford Greediness as a constraint? Conference on Computational Psycholinguistics (CPL97), University of California at Berkeley, August 10-12. pdf