How children learn to use language

There have been many theories about how children learn to use language. Professor Narasimhan proposed a theory of child language acquisition based on behavioural pragmatics. In this article we present a simplified version of his theories about how children learn to communicate, to describe, manipulate and explore the world around them from exposure to variety of language utterances and non-verbal inputs such as gestures and pointing. We also discuss the method he used to substantiate his ideas, and briefly present a computational model of the ideas arising from his work. Raman Chandrasekar has been with Microsoft Research, Redmond, USA. since 1998. His current research interests are at the intersection of information retrieval, natural language processing and machine learning. He received his PhD from TIFR, Bombay.