Scientific knowledge grows at a phenomenal pace--but few books have had as lasting an impact or played as important a role in our modern world as The Mathematical Theory of Communication, published originally as a paper on communication theory more than fifty years ago. Republished in book form shortly thereafter, it has since gone through four hardcover and sixteen paperback printings. It is a revolutionary work, astounding in its foresight and contemporaneity. The University of Illinois Press is pleased and honored (...) to issue this commemorative reprinting of a classic. (shrink)

In this study, we apply MOSAIC (model of syntax acquisition in children) to the simulation of the developmental patterning of children's optional infinitive (OI) errors in 4 languages: English, Dutch, German, and Spanish. MOSAIC, which has already simulated this phenomenon in Dutch and English, now implements a learning mechanism that better reflects the theoretical assumptions underlying it, as well as a chunking mechanism that results in frequent phrases being treated as 1 unit. Using 1, identical model that learns from child‐directed (...) speech, we obtain a close quantitative fit to the data from all 4 languages despite there being considerable cross‐linguistic and developmental variation in the OI phenomenon. MOSAIC successfully simulates the difference between Spanish (a pro‐drop language in which OI errors are virtually absent) and obligatory subject languages that do display the OI phenomenon. It also highlights differences in the OI phenomenon across German and Dutch, 2 closely related languages whose grammar is virtually identical with respect to the relation between finiteness and verb placement. Taken together, these results suggest that (a) cross‐linguistic differences in the rates at which children produce OIs are graded, quantitative differences that closely reflect the statistical properties of the input they are exposed to and (b) theories of syntax acquisition need to consider more closely the role of input characteristics as determinants of quantitative differences in the cross‐linguistic patterning of phenomena in language acquisition. (shrink)

A word-by-word human sentence processing complexity metric is presented. This metric formalizes the intuition that comprehenders have more trouble on words contributing larger amounts of information about the syntactic structure of the sentence as a whole. The formalization is in terms of the conditional entropy of grammatical continuations, given the words that have been heard so far. To calculate the predictions of this metric, Wilson and Carroll's (1954) original entropy reduction idea is extended to infinite languages. This is demonstrated with (...) a mildly context-sensitive language that includes relative clauses formed on a variety of grammatical relations across the Accessibility Hierarchy of Keenan and Comrie (1977). Predictions are derived that correlate significantly with repetition accuracy results obtained in a sentence-memory experiment (Keenan & Hawkins, 1987). (shrink)