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The crosslinguistic acquisition of sentence structure: Computational modeling and grammaticality judgments from adult and child speakers of English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'()
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Ambridge, Ben; Maitreyee, Ramya; Tatsumi, Tomoko; Doherty, Laura; Zicherman, Shira; Pedro, Pedro Mateo; Bannard, Colin; Samanta, Soumitra; McCauley, Stewart; Arnon, Inbal; Bekman, Dani; Efrati, Amir; Berman, Ruth; Narasimhan, Bhuvana; Sharma, Dipti Misra; Nair, Rukmini Bhaya; Fukumura, Kumiko; Campbell, Seth; Pye, Clifton; Pixabaj, Sindy Fabiola Can; Pelíz, Mario Marroquín; Mendoza, Margarita Julajuj
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In: Cognition (2020)
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Abstract:
This preregistered study tested three theoretical proposals for how children form productive yet restricted linguistic generalizations, avoiding errors such as *The clown laughed the man, across three age groups (5–6 years, 9–10 years, adults) and five languages (English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'). Participants rated, on a five-point scale, correct and ungrammatical sentences describing events of causation (e.g., *Someone laughed the man; Someone made the man laugh; Someone broke the truck; ?Someone made the truck break). The verb-semantics hypothesis predicts that, for all languages, by-verb differences in acceptability ratings will be predicted by the extent to which the causing and caused event (e.g., amusing and laughing) merge conceptually into a single event (as rated by separate groups of adult participants). The entrenchment and preemption hypotheses predict, for all languages, that by-verb differences in acceptability ratings will be predicted by, respectively, the verb's relative overall frequency, and frequency in nearly-synonymous constructions (e.g., X made Y laugh for *Someone laughed the man). Analysis using mixed effects models revealed that entrenchment/preemption effects (which could not be distinguished due to collinearity) were observed for all age groups and all languages except K'iche', which suffered from a thin corpus and showed only preemption sporadically. All languages showed effects of event-merge semantics, except K'iche' which showed only effects of supplementary semantic predictors. We end by presenting a computational model which successfully simulates this pattern of results in a single discriminative-learning mechanism, achieving by-verb correlations of around r = 0.75 with human judgment data.
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Keyword:
Article
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URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104310
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32623135
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7397526/
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The crosslinguistic acquisition of sentence structure: Computational modeling and grammaticality judgments from adult and child speakers of English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'.
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