Acquiring formulaic language

McCauley, Stewart M.; Christiansen, Morten H.

doi:10.1075/ml.9.3.03mcc

Cited by 76 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 29 publications

(45 reference statements)

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“…Thus, whereas the first two examples illustrated interactions between properties of a particular word and word order of an entire utterance, this example shows that semantic relationships between two words also affect word order. All of these examples of word and word order interdependence are broadly compatible with models of language production that represent production as activation of learned weights in a connectionist architecture; these representations arguably cross item and order memory (Chang et al, 2006;Dell and Chang, 2014;McCauley and Christiansen, 2014). In this view, language production models could serve as highly informative models of serial recall, especially when the models engage in sentence repetition (see Ueno et al, 2011 for word repetition and Fischer-Baum, 2018 for other potential commonalities in serial order representations).…”

Section: Potential Research Directions and Predictions For A Languagementioning

confidence: 60%

Verbal Working Memory as Emergent from Language Comprehension and Production

Schwering

MacDonald

2020

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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This article reviews current models of verbal working memory and considers the role of language comprehension and long-term memory in the ability to maintain and order verbal information for short periods of time. While all models of verbal working memory posit some interaction with long-term memory, few have considered the character of these long-term representations or how they might affect performance on verbal working memory tasks. Similarly, few models have considered how comprehension processes and production processes might affect performance in verbal working memory tasks. Modern theories of comprehension emphasize that people learn a vast web of correlated information about the language and the world and must activate that information from long-term memory to cope with the demands of language input. To date, there has been little consideration in theories of verbal working memory for how this rich input from comprehension would affect the nature of temporary memory. There has also been relatively little attention to the degree to which language production processes naturally manage serial order of verbal information. The authors argue for an emergent model of verbal working memory supported by a rich, distributed long-term memory for language. On this view, comprehension processes provide encoding in verbal working memory tasks, and production processes maintenance, serial ordering, and recall. Moreover, the computational capacity to maintain and order information varies with language experience. Implications for theories of working memory, comprehension, and production are considered.

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Section: Potential Research Directions and Predictions For A Languagementioning

confidence: 60%

Verbal Working Memory as Emergent from Language Comprehension and Production

Schwering

MacDonald

2020

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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“…Tracking conditional probabilities may lead to the formation of chunks at later stages of learning, which then become elements themselves between which conditional probabilities may be tracked. In fact, recent models of language acquisition have demonstrated the feasibility of such a process (McCauley & Christiansen, 2014;Monaghan & Christiansen, 2010). Thinking of chunks as the outcome of statistical learning provides a direct connection with entrenchment: Throughout learning, frequently co-occurring elements and structures become more deeply entrenched, strengthening such representations.…”

Section: Implicit Learning Meets Statistical Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Statistical learning as a domain-general mechanism of entrenchment.

Jost¹,

Christiansen²

2017

Entrenchment and the Psychology of Language Learning: How We Reorganize and Adapt Linguistic Knowledge.

Self Cite

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The birth of the statistical learning literature is often traced back to Reberʼs (1967) seminal study on implicit learning using an artificial grammar learning paradigm. However, to fully understand the relationship between such early implicit learning studies and the current notion of statistical learning, it is important also to consider its conception. The theory of perceptual learning by J. J. Gibson and Gibson (1955) paved the way for accounts of learning with a basis in sensory experience. In the Gibsonsʼ theory of perceptual learning, which has close parallels to current ideas about entrenchment (Schmid, 2007), repeated experience with a percept enhances oneʼs ability to discriminate between it and other percepts. This chapter argues that a communicative system characterized by entrenchment, as posited in this volume, likely relies to a considerable extent on the ability to track, learn, and use underlying associative relationships between linguistic elements and structures in comprehension and production. When considering the origin of statistical learning as a theoretical construct, it is also important to consider the early work of Miller and Selfridge (1950), who thought that a reliance on transitional probabilities may be similar to the way in which grammar is learned. Other research informed by both Millerʼs work and the theory of perceptual learning espoused by J. J. Gibson and Gibson (1955) demonstrated that frequent co-occurrence due to underlying structure improved participantsʼ recall of letter sequences (Miller, 1958) and that learning the positional relationships between linguistic units (i.e., morphemes) occurs as an experiential process of familiarization with the temporal positions in which such units are frequently encountered (Braine, 1963). This laid the foundation for future research investigating the close relationship between frequent co-occurrence and the strength and automaticity of recall at various levels of linguistic analysis. From the beginning, research on implicit learning related to language was focused on the way(s) in which units of linguistic information are formed. Some of the early explanations for the ways in which this learning happened relied on experiencebased accounts, as just described. However, experience-independent theories of language acquisition quickly became the dominant perspective primarily because of the widespread acceptance of the "poverty of the stimulus" argument (Chomsky, 1965; Crain, 1991). Saffran, Aslin, and Newportʼs (1996) research gave the psychology of

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“…To date, MWUs have been investigated in studies on first language acquisition (Bannard and Matthews, 2008; Arnon and Clark, 2011; McCauley and Christiansen, 2014) as well as in work concerned with adult processing (Arnon and Snider, 2010; Arnon and Priva, 2014). Findings in the two areas suggest that both adults and children possess cognitive representations of MWUs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Facilitatory Effects of Multi-Word Units in Lexical Processing and Word Learning: A Computational Investigation

et al. 2017

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Previous studies have suggested that children and adults form cognitive representations of co-occurring word sequences. We propose (1) that the formation of such multi-word unit (MWU) representations precedes and facilitates the formation of single-word representations in children and thus benefits word learning, and (2) that MWU representations facilitate adult word recognition and thus benefit lexical processing. Using a modified version of an existing computational model (McCauley and Christiansen, 2014), we extract MWUs from a corpus of child-directed speech (CDS) and a corpus of conversations among adults. We then correlate the number of MWUs within which each word appears with (1) age of first production and (2) adult reaction times on a word recognition task. In doing so, we take care to control for the effect of word frequency, as frequent words will naturally tend to occur in many MWUs. We also compare results to a baseline model which randomly groups words into sequences—and find that MWUs have a unique facilitatory effect on both response variables, suggesting that they benefit word learning in children and word recognition in adults. The effect is strongest on age of first production, implying that MWUs are comparatively more important for word learning than for adult lexical processing. We discuss possible underlying mechanisms and formulate testable predictions.

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Acquiring formulaic language

Cited by 76 publications

References 29 publications

Verbal Working Memory as Emergent from Language Comprehension and Production

Verbal Working Memory as Emergent from Language Comprehension and Production

Statistical learning as a domain-general mechanism of entrenchment.

Facilitatory Effects of Multi-Word Units in Lexical Processing and Word Learning: A Computational Investigation

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