The crosslinguistic acquisition of sentence structure: Computational modeling and grammaticality judgments from adult and child speakers of English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'.
Causative
Child language acquisition
English
Entrenchment
Hebrew
Hindi
Japanese
K'iche
Preemption
Verb semantics
Journal
Cognition
ISSN: 1873-7838
Titre abrégé: Cognition
Pays: Netherlands
ID NLM: 0367541
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
09 2020
09 2020
Historique:
received:
17
09
2019
revised:
31
03
2020
accepted:
13
04
2020
pubmed:
6
7
2020
medline:
24
6
2021
entrez:
6
7
2020
Statut:
ppublish
Résumé
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.
Identifiants
pubmed: 32623135
pii: S0010-0277(20)30129-3
doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104310
pmc: PMC7397526
pii:
doi:
Types de publication
Journal Article
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Pagination
104310Informations de copyright
Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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