Studies at the interface of child language and models of language acquisition

Thornton, Rosalind

doi:10.1177/0142723711403881

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…English [SUBJECT] [VERB] [OBJECT]) – are agreed upon by virtually all theories, with disagreements revolving solely around timing: are these abstractions present from birth (e.g. Pinker, 1989; Thornton, 2012; Wexler, 1998), formed very quickly (e.g. Gertner, Fisher, & Eisengart, 2006), or formed more gradually (e.g.…”

Section: Introduction: a Rare But Misplaced Consensus In Language Amentioning

confidence: 99%

Against stored abstractions: A radical exemplar model of language acquisition

Ambridge

2019

First Language

114

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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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Section: Introduction: a Rare But Misplaced Consensus In Language Amentioning

confidence: 99%

Against stored abstractions: A radical exemplar model of language acquisition

Ambridge

2019

First Language

114

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“…Future work should focus on modelling child multimodal processing, currently limited by the scarcity of naturalistic multimodal corpora (e.g., Nikolaus, Alishahi, & Chrupała, 2022). Finally, enriching models' input would allow researchers to test if acquiring multimodal knowledge suffices to capture sensitivity to top-down structures, or whether one would need to integrate domain-specific constraints in line with nativist approaches (e.g., Pinker, 1989;Thornton, 2012) or more domain-general innate biases (e.g., Perfors, Tenenbaum, & Regier, 2011).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing Children and Large Language Models in Word Sense Disambiguation: Insights and Challenges

Cabiddu¹,

Nikolaus²,

Fourtassi³

2023

Preprint

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Understanding how children process ambiguous words is a challenge because sense disambiguation depends on sentence context bottom-up and top-down aspects. Here, we seek in- sight into this phenomenon by investigating how such a com- petence might arise in large distributional learners (Transform- ers) that purport to acquire sense representations from lan- guage input in a largely unsupervised fashion. We investigated how sense disambiguation might be achieved using model rep- resentations derived from naturalistic child-directed speech. We tested a large pool of Transformer models, varying in their pretraining input size/nature as well as the size of their param- eter space. Tested across three behavioral experiments from the developmental literature, we found that these models cap- ture some essential properties of child sense disambiguation, although most still struggle in the more challenging tasks with contrastive cues. We discuss implications for both theories of word learning and for using Transformers to capture child lan- guage processing.

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“…Dalam pemerolehan bahasa pertama memang sangat dipengaruhi oleh tiap-tiap anak, hal inilah yang menyatakan bahwa kemampuan berbahasa pada anak telah ada sejak lahir. (Thornton, 2012) dalam penelitian "Studies at the interface of child language and models of language acquisition" menjelaskan tentang beberapa asumsi umum tentang penguasaan bahasa pertama, diantaranya: bahwa anak-anak dilahirkan dengan kecenderungan bawaan untuk memperoleh suatu bahasa. Selain itu, juga memprediksikan bahwa anak-anak memiliki bahasa bawaan tertentu dengan arsitektur modular.…”

Section: Pendahuluanunclassified

SOUNDS AND PRONUNCIATION (Children's First Language Acquisition Model in the Pragmatic Process)

Jayanti

2019

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The aim of the study was to determine the stages of the linguistic first language acquisition process which emphasized the aspects of sound and pronunciation in children aged two to four years. Research focuses on phonological analysis of sound and pronunciation in a pragmatic perspective. This type of qualitative research uses a cross sectional approach, namely data collection from the age of two to four years at the same time in order to obtain complete and fast data so that it can describe each individual in the process of acquiring his language. The focus of research is all sounds or sounds that are spoken or produced by the child in a pragmatic view, namely when communicating. Sub focus in research is the sound and pronunciation of children according to the theory of Susan M. Gass and Larry Se, at the initial stage the pronunciation of children is not the same as the pronunciation of adults. Some sounds can be distinguished at first such as: the difference between consonants in [ta] and [da]. Even when children start using words that more or less resemble adult words, at least in a sense, there are different pronunciations, namely deletion of syllables (em..bek→goat), elimination of sound (japah→jerapah→giraffe), and simplification process words (fis→fish). The results showed that there was a relationship between the ability of sound produced by children and pragmatic rules according to their age. In the acquisition of languages and stages of linguistic processes with almost the same age there are also differences between children with each other.

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Studies at the interface of child language and models of language acquisition

Cited by 4 publications

References 33 publications

Against stored abstractions: A radical exemplar model of language acquisition

Against stored abstractions: A radical exemplar model of language acquisition

Comparing Children and Large Language Models in Word Sense Disambiguation: Insights and Challenges

SOUNDS AND PRONUNCIATION (Children's First Language Acquisition Model in the Pragmatic Process)

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