If a pattern is reilably present in the adult input, the child picks it up quickly. Rare and unreliable patterns are learned late and are relatively weaker even in adults. I am working on a project that aims at describing and analyzing the syntactic properties of Interlanguage Spanish as spoken by adult native speakers of Quechua who acquire Spanish in naturalistic settings not involving formal education. The next stage in the research project involves the description and analysis of the topic-focus structure of Interlanguage Spanish. My research interests in language include computer simulation of human language understanding.
Human beings use symbolic processes to solve problems, reason, speak and write, learn and invent.
Over the past thirty years, cognitive psychology has built and tested empirical models of these processes as they are used to perform simple tasks. The models take the form of computer programs that simulate human behavior. My colleagues and I are seeking to extend the range of such explanations of human thinking to new phenomena and domains. Our research is focused on the phenomena of learning from examples, finding good problem representations, and making scientific discoveries. By experimenting on the relation between problem difficulty and the way a problem is formulated, we are trying to understand how problem solvers can discover and use new and more effective problem representations.