He earned his PhD in Applied Linguistics at UCLA in 1988. His background is a combination of linguistics, language teaching, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. Until recently his work focused on computational, especially connectionist, modeling of linguistic and cognitive development, including second language learning, morphology, phonology, rhythm, conceptual relations, and word meaning. In order to bring his research in line with his politics, he is now looking into the application of techniques and concepts from computational linguistics and artificial intelligence to the development of tools that further the democratization of knowledge.