Charles Yang (born 1973) is a linguist and cognitive scientist. He is currently Professor in the Department of Linguistics at theUniversity of Pennsylvania.^[1] His research focuses onlanguage acquisition, variation and change, and is carried out from a broadlyChomskyan perspective.

Yang is a graduate ofMIT'sAI Lab. His first book,Knowledge and Learning in Natural Language (2002), proposes a model of syntactic acquisition couched within thePrinciples and Parameters framework. In this model, different grammatical options are associated with different probabilities, which change over time. The model is applied to a number of case studies in language acquisition andhistorical linguistics. His second book,The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World (2006), is written for a popular audience, and explores acquisition and knowledge of language. Yang's third book,The Price of Productivity: How Children Learn to Break the Rules of Language (2016), won theLinguistic Society of America'sLeonard Bloomfield Award.^[2] This book deals with the acquisition of linguistic rules with exceptions, and proposes a quantifiable upper bound on the number of lexical exceptions that a grammatical rule can tolerate.

In 2018, Yang was awarded aGuggenheim Fellowship.^[3]

• —— (2001).Knowledge and Learning in Natural Language (PhD thesis). MIT.hdl:1721.1/86586.
• —— (2002).Knowledge and Learning in Natural Language. Oxford University Press.ISBN 978-0-19-925414-9.
• —— (2006).The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World. New York: Scribner.ISBN 978-0-7432-3756-7.
• —— (2016).The Price of Productivity: How Children Learn to Break the Rules of Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.ISBN 978-0-262-03532-3.

• Personal webpage

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