NLP researchers have become increasingly interested in unsupervised and minimally supervised methods, and the rise of probabilistic models of cognition (Chater and Oaksford 1998;Griffiths, Kemp, and Tenenbaum 2008) means there is now a growing number of cognitive scientists who are well-versed in many of the same statistical methods that are used in NLP.
a short introductory text on computational modeling of human language acquisition seems particularly apt at this time.