Language type frequency and learnability from a connectionist perspective

Everbroeck, Ezra Van

doi:10.1515/lity.2003.011

Cited by 25 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Guy, 1996;Ohala, 1989). A promising account along these lines is presented by simulations of case marking and constituent order interactions (Lupyan & Christiansen, 2002;Van Everbroeck, 2003). For example, in Van Everbroeck's simulations, the model was trained to determine grammatical function of each sequentially presented word in a sentence.…”

Section: The Mechanism Underlying Learning Outcomesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Similarly—and discussed in more detail below—there is an inverse correlation between case marking and constituent order flexibility and learnability: Flexible constituent order languages are learned more successfully by connectionist networks if case marking is available (Lupyan & Christiansen, ; Van Everbroeck, ). The current work tests whether these simulations are supported by data from human language learners.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Balancing Effort and Information Transmission During Language Acquisition: Evidence From Word Order and Case Marking

2016

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Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as (statistical) language universals. One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here we explore whether this correlation can be explained by a bias to balance production effort and informativity of cues to grammatical function. Two groups of learners were presented with miniature artificial languages containing optional case marking and either flexible or fixed constituent order. Learners of the flexible order language used case marking significantly more often. This result parallels the typological correlation between constituent order flexibility and the presence of case marking in a language and provides a possible explanation for the historical development of Old English to Modern English, from flexible constituent order with case marking to relatively fixed order without case marking. Additionally, learners of the flexible order language conditioned case marking on constituent order, using more case marking with the cross-linguistically less frequent order, again mirroring typological data. These results suggest that some cross-linguistic generalizations originate in functionally motivated biases operating during language learning.

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Section: The Mechanism Underlying Learning Outcomesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Balancing Effort and Information Transmission During Language Acquisition: Evidence From Word Order and Case Marking

2016

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“…Within the burgeoning literature on computer simulation of language emergence and change (see Refs 154–156; see also Ref 157), researchers have implemented human processing theories into their artificial agents, observing the languages that emerge as a result. Implementing the processing theories found in Hawkins10 leads to a distribution of emergent language types similar to the true typological distribution (see Ref 158; see also Refs 11,159).…”

Section: Investigating the Link Between Language Usage And Typologymentioning

confidence: 99%

On language ‘utility’: processing complexity and communicative efficiency

Jaeger

Tily

2010

WIRES Cognitive Science

116

107

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Functionalist typologists have long argued that pressures associated with language usage influence the distribution of grammatical properties across the world's languages. Specifically, grammatical properties may be observed more often across languages because they improve a language's utility or decrease its complexity. While this approach to the study of typology offers the potential of explaining grammatical patterns in terms of general principles rather than domain-specific constraints, the notions of utility and complexity are more often grounded in intuition than empirical findings. A suitable empirical foundation might be found in the terms of processing preferences: in that case, psycholinguistic measures of complexity are then expected correlate with typological patterns. We summarize half a century of psycholinguistic work on 'processing complexity' in an attempt to make this work accessible to a broader audience: What makes something hard to process for comprehenders, and what determines speakers' preferences in production? We also briefly discuss recently emerging approaches that link preferences in production to communicative efficiency. These approaches can be seen as providing well-defined measures of utility. With these psycholinguistic findings in mind, it is possible to investigate the extent to which language usage is reflected in typological patterns. We close with a summary of paradigms that allow the link between language usage and typology to be studied empirically. WIREs Cogni Sci 2011 2 323-335 DOI: 10.1002/wcs.126 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

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“…The sentence comprehension literature demonstrates the vital role of case markers in predicting the final verb in verb-final constructions of languages like German (Levy and Keller, 2013) and Japanese (Grissom II et al, 2016). Moreover, in recent years, deploying artificial languages to test hypotheses about language processing and learning has been in vogue in both connectionist modelling (Lupyan and Christiansen, 2002;Everbroeck, 2003) as well as behavioural experiments (Kurumada and Jaeger, 2015;Fedzechkina et al, 2017). Inspired by the cited works, we created a caseless version of Hindi by removing case markers (those listed in Table 1) from both reference and variant sentences.…”

Section: Case Markers and Processing Efficiencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Surprisal and Interference Effects of Case Markers in

Ranjan¹,

Agarwal²,

Rajkumar³

2019

Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics

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Based on the Production-Distribution-Comprehension (PDC) account of language processing, we formulate two distinct hypotheses about case marking, word order choices and processing in Hindi. Our first hypothesis is that Hindi tends to optimize for processing efficiency at both lexical and syntactic levels. We quantify the role of case markers in this process. For the task of predicting the reference sentence occurring in a corpus (amidst meaning-equivalent grammatical variants) using a machine learning model, surprisal estimates from an artificial version of the language (i.e., Hindi without any case markers) result in lower prediction accuracy compared to natural Hindi. Our second hypothesis is that Hindi tends to minimize interference due to case markers while ordering preverbal constituents. We show that Hindi tends to avoid placing next to each other constituents whose heads are marked by identical case inflections. Our findings adhere to PDC assumptions and we discuss their implications for language production, learning and universals.

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Language type frequency and learnability from a connectionist perspective

Cited by 25 publications

References 46 publications

Balancing Effort and Information Transmission During Language Acquisition: Evidence From Word Order and Case Marking

Balancing Effort and Information Transmission During Language Acquisition: Evidence From Word Order and Case Marking

On language ‘utility’: processing complexity and communicative efficiency

Surprisal and Interference Effects of Case Markers in

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