Language learning is considered by many to be one of the central problems of linguistics and, more generally, cognitive science. Yet, the very same interdisciplinary nature that makes this field of study so interesting, makes it somehow difficult for researchers to reach a thorough understanding of the issues at play. This follows from the fact that research in the field by necessity has to draw on techniques and results that come from traditionally disparate fields such as linguistics, psychology and computer science.

This book has been conceived as a companion to learnability for the benefit of those linguists that base their work on Chomsky's Principles and Parameters Hypothesis. General concepts from formal learning theory and complexity theory and important facts from developmental psycholinguistics, historical linguistics and language processing have been introduced in a tutorial and completely self-contained fashion, so as to introduce linguists of the parametric persuasion to important techniques that can be used (and indeed have been used in the recent research literature) to obtain interesting and empirically testable predictions from parametric theories of language variation.

The tutorial nature of the book is demonstrated by the large number of exercises that can be used by readers to test their understanding of the material. In the editing of the book a conscious effort has been made in order to integrate the five chapters as tightly as possible by means of extensive cross-referencing.