What infants know about syntax but couldn't have learned: experimental evidence for syntactic structure at 18 months

Lidz, Jeffrey; Waxman, Sandra R.; Freedman, Jennifer A.

doi:10.1016/s0010-0277(03)00116-1

Cited by 163 publications

(149 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Nonetheless, the above findings provide substantial motivation for further developing usage-based accounts of language acquisition. This optimism is supported by demonstrations of the functional underpinnings of anaphora constraints (van Hoek, 1997;Harris and Bates 2002) and proposals that these need not be taken as a priori unlearnable (Akhtar et al 2004;Lidz et al 2003;;MacWhinney, 2004). The proposal put forward here is that children's knowledge of anaphora constraints depends on understanding i) the relative accessibility of di¤erent referring expressions ii) the contexts in which referring expressions occur, particularly in within-sentence grammatical hierarchies and iii) the contrastive values of pronouns and reflexives.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 79%

Pronoun co-referencing errors: Challenges for generativist and usage-based accounts

Matthews

Lieven

Theakston

et al. 2009

Cognitive Linguistics

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 79%

Pronoun co-referencing errors: Challenges for generativist and usage-based accounts

Matthews

Lieven

Theakston

et al. 2009

Cognitive Linguistics

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“…Oh, look -there's another black cat.) Lidz, Waxman, & Freedman (2003) ran a series of experiments with 18-month-old children to test their interpretations of one in utterances like (1), and found that they too shared this intuition. So, Lidz, Waxman, & Freedman (2003) concluded that this knowledge about how to interpret one must be known by 18 months.…”

Section: Syntax-semantics Mappingmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…These ambiguous data dominate children's input for anaphoric one, and only rarely do unambiguous data appear (approximately 0.25% according to a corpus analysis by Lidz, Waxman, & Freedman (2003) and never in the corpus analysis conducted by Pearl & Mis (2011)). This is unsurprising once we realize that unambiguous data require a specific coincidence of utterance and situation.…”

Section: Syntax-semantics Mappingmentioning

confidence: 98%

Statistical Learning, Inductive Bias, and Bayesian Inference in Language Acquisition

Pearl¹,

Goldwater²

2016

Oxford Handbooks Online

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Bayesian models of language acquisition are powerful tools for exploring how linguistic generalizations can be made. Notably, Bayesian models assume children leverage statistical information in sophisticated ways, and so it is important to demonstrate that children’s behavior is consistent with both the assumptions of the Bayesian framework and the predictions of specific models. We first provide a historical overview of behavioral evidence suggesting children utilize available statistical information to make useful generalizations in a variety of tasks. We then discuss the Bayesian modeling framework, including benefits of particular interest to both developmental and theoretical linguists. We conclude with a review of several case studies that demonstrate how Bayesian models can be applied to problems of interest in language acquisition.

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“…The central puzzle of language acquisition is to determine which features of the acquired abstract system are constructed on the basis of experience and which features require specialized knowledge structures that restrict the ways that children generalize. Typically, we see the influence of children's learning mechanisms through patterns of overgeneralization (28)(29)(30)(31)(32), patterns in which children amplify less-reliable statistical patterns (33)(34)(35), or patterns in which children's knowledge goes beyond what is expressed in their exposure (23,(36)(37)(38)(39)(40)(41). Here, we have found a previously unidentified source of evidence for the child's contribution to language learning: a pattern of unpredictable individual variation among speakers, including children and their own parents, of ostensibly a single language.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Endogenous sources of variation in language acquisition

Han

Musolino

Lidz

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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A fundamental question in the study of human language acquisition centers around apportioning explanatory force between the experience of the learner and the core knowledge that allows learners to represent that experience. We provide a previously unidentified kind of data identifying children's contribution to language acquisition. We identify one aspect of grammar that varies unpredictably across a population of speakers of what is ostensibly a single language. We further demonstrate that the grammatical knowledge of parents and their children is independent. The combination of unpredictable variation and parent-child independence suggests that the relevant structural feature is supplied by each learner independent of experience with the language. This structural feature is abstract because it controls variation in more than one construction. The particular case we examine is the position of the verb in the clause structure of Korean. Because Korean is a head-final language, evidence for the syntactic position of the verb is both rare and indirect. We show that (i) Korean speakers exhibit substantial variability regarding this aspect of the grammar, (ii) this variability is attested between speakers but not within a speaker, (iii) this variability controls interpretation in two surface constructions, and (iv) it is independent in parents and children. According to our findings, when the exposure language is compatible with multiple grammars, learners acquire a single systematic grammar. Our observation that children and their parents vary independently suggests that the choice of grammar is driven in part by a process operating internal to individual learners.syntax | language acquisition | learning | verb raising | quantifier scope T he tension between nature and nurture permeates the study of learning in humans and animals. In the domain of human language, this tension has proven especially difficult to resolve because all human language learners are awash in linguistic data. When children learn a particular feature of their language, did the data of experience allow for the construction of knowledge through general cognitive mechanisms of categorization and generalization, or did that experience play more of a triggering role, facilitating the expression of abstract core knowledge in a way that is consistent with the speech of the ambient community? In other areas of biology, this kind of tension is often resolved experimentally through selective rearing (1-3). Restricting the exposure of the learning organism to only a subset of the data that a normally developing organism receives allows us to identify the role of data in typical development. Such experiments are unethical to conduct with human children, but nature may sometimes provide them by accident. One commonly discussed case concerns the language acquisition profiles of children who are not exposed to a natural language, due to a combination of biological and sociological factors, as in the case of deaf children without access to a signing communit...

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What infants know about syntax but couldn't have learned: experimental evidence for syntactic structure at 18 months

Cited by 163 publications

References 15 publications

Pronoun co-referencing errors: Challenges for generativist and usage-based accounts

Pronoun co-referencing errors: Challenges for generativist and usage-based accounts

Statistical Learning, Inductive Bias, and Bayesian Inference in Language Acquisition

Endogenous sources of variation in language acquisition

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