Computational models of early learning in children What are currently used biologically plausible computational models/frameworks of early learning in children?

Personally, I have used cascade correlation neural nets to model pronoun acquisition in children, but in hindsight, I consider this framework to be not neurobiologically plausible.
Are there existing computational frameworks that have been used for early-learning and development in children that have a reasonable biologically justification? For example: just being a neural net model is not a reasonable justification, but a neural net model witch has local update rules (like Hebbian learning) and models neurons more realistically (instead of just saying they are a sigmoid function without any further biological justification) would be fine. General non-connectionist frameworks with empirical justification are also of interest, even if they don't have a solid reductionist account.
Notes
I have asked an alternate version of this question on Linguistics.SE that focuses on language acquisition instead of general learning, but considers both children and adults.
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)