How the input shapes the acquisition of verb morphology: Elicited production and computational modelling in two highly inflected languages

Engelmann, Felix; Granlund, Sonia; Kołak, Joanna; Szreder, Marta; Ambridge, Ben; Pine, Julián M.; Theakston, Anna L.; Lieven, Elena

doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2019.02.001

Cited by 37 publications

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“…A second advantage of the framework is its simplicity. Unlike, for example, three-layer connectionist networks (e.g., Engelmann et al, 2019 ), discriminative learning models do not incorporate hidden units. Indeed, for the present simulations, we found that adding a hidden layer made virtually no difference to the results.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The crosslinguistic acquisition of sentence structure: Computational modeling and grammaticality judgments from adult and child speakers of English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'

et al. 2020

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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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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The crosslinguistic acquisition of sentence structure: Computational modeling and grammaticality judgments from adult and child speakers of English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'

et al. 2020

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“…We should therefore not be surprised to learn that studies of both verb and noun morphology (Aguado-Orea & Pine, 2015; Dąbrowska, 2004, 2008; Dąbrowska & Szczerbinski, 2006; Engelmann et al, 2019; Granlund et al, 2019; Kirjavainen, Nikolaev, & Kidd, 2012; Kjærbæk, dePont Christensen, & Basbøll, 2014; Krajewski, Theakston, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2011; Kunnari et al, 2011; Leonard, Caselli, & Devescovi, 2002; Maratsos, 2000; Maslen et al, 2004; Räsänen et al, 2016; Rubino & Pine, 1998; Saviciute, Ambridge, & Pine, 2018) yield three findings that constitute evidence for an exemplar (or connectionist) account. The first is an effect of phonological neighbourhood density: the greater the number of phonological ‘friends’ or ‘neighbours’ – forms that are phonologically similar to the target and that take the same inflectional ending – the greater the rate at which children produce the target form correctly, and the lower the error rate.…”

Section: Morphologically Inflected Wordsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Against stored abstractions: A radical exemplar model of language acquisition

Ambridge

2019

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The goal of this article is to make the case for a radical exemplar account of child language acquisition, under which unwitnessed forms are produced and comprehended by on-the-fly analogy across multiple stored exemplars, weighted by their degree of similarity to the target with regard to the task at hand. Across the domains of (1) word meanings, (2) morphologically inflected words, (3) n-grams, (4) sentence-level constructions and (5) phonetics and phonology, accounts based on independently-represented abstractions (whether formal rules or prototype categories) fail for two reasons. First, it is not possible to posit abstractions that delineate possible and impossible form; e.g. that (1) rule in pool tables and data tables, but rule out chairs, (2) rule in the past-tense forms netted and bet but rule out * setted and * jet, (3) rule in the bigram f+t but rule out (probabilistically) v+t, (4) rule in both John feared Bill and John frightened Bill but rule out * John laughed Bill, (5) rule in Speaker A but rule out Speaker B as the person who produced a particular word (e.g. Sa’urday). Second, for each domain, empirical data provide evidence of exemplar storage that cannot be captured by putative abstractions: e.g. speakers prefer and/or show an advantage for (1) exemplar variation even within word-meaning ‘category boundaries’, (2) novel inflected forms that are similar to existing exemplars, (3) n-grams that have occurred frequently in the input, (4) SVO sentences with he as SUBJECT and it as OBJECT and (5) repeated productions of ‘the same’ word that are phonologically similar or, better still, identical. An exemplar account avoids an intractable lumping-or-splitting dilemma facing abstraction-based accounts and provides a unitary explanation of language acquisition across all domains; one that is consistent with models and empirical findings from the computational modelling and neuroimaging literature.

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“…Indeed, this relatively simple paradigm may not require such elaborate architecture. In principle, though, a BERT-type model is well placed to simulate acquisition of complex paradigms of inflectional morphology (such as the Polish verb system, modelled by Engelmann et al [2019], using a connectionist network, though with only a hidden single layer). Because a BERT-type model posits commonalities only when doing so improves performance on its task (e.g.…”

Section: Morphologically Inflected Wordsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Abstractions made of exemplars or ‘You’re all right, and I’ve changed my mind’: Response to commentators

Ambridge

2020

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In this response to commentators, I agree with those who suggested that the distinction between exemplar- and abstraction-based accounts is something of a false dichotomy and therefore move to an abstractions-made-of-exemplars account under which (a) we store all the exemplars that we hear (subject to attention, decay, interference, etc.) but (b) in the service of language use, re-represent these exemplars at multiple levels of abstraction, as simulated by computational neural-network models such as BERT, ELMo and GPT-3. Whilst I maintain that traditional linguistic abstractions (e.g. a DETERMINER category; SUBJECT VERB OBJECT word order) are no more than human-readable approximations of the type of abstractions formed by both human and artificial multiple-layer networks, I express hope that the abstractions-made-of-exemplars position can point the way towards a truce in the language acquisition wars: We were all right all along, just focusing on different levels of abstraction.

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How the input shapes the acquisition of verb morphology: Elicited production and computational modelling in two highly inflected languages

Cited by 37 publications

References 88 publications

The crosslinguistic acquisition of sentence structure: Computational modeling and grammaticality judgments from adult and child speakers of English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'

The crosslinguistic acquisition of sentence structure: Computational modeling and grammaticality judgments from adult and child speakers of English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'

Against stored abstractions: A radical exemplar model of language acquisition

Abstractions made of exemplars or ‘You’re all right, and I’ve changed my mind’: Response to commentators

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