Computational models of early learning in children
Here's something I dug up for language: a Computer Science Thesis from Boulder:

The Sensorimotor Foundations of Phonology: A Computational Model of Early Childhood Articulatory and Phonetic Development (1994)

it discusses what it calls HABLAR (Hierarchical Articulatory Based Language
Acquisition by Reinforcement learning).  

From the reductionist/biology side, developing brains have a much higher population of gap junctions.  I would speculate that this would create a much more analog brain, as gap junctions are modeled diffusively, unlike synaptic connections, which can be modeled in a more binary way.  I would speculate that the analog driving of the environmental and genetic signals leads to the formation and orgnaization of the synaptic connectivity.

I wonder if one could find a correlation between plasticity and gap junctions.  They are found to connect axons laterally in hippocampal cells (a region of brain that remains plastic through adulthood)