Journal article
Prospects for usage-based computational models of grammatical development: argument structure and semantic roles
Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science, Vol.5(4), pp.489-499
07/01/2014
DOI: 10.1002/wcs.1295
PMID: 26308658
Abstract
The computational modeling of language development has enabled researchers to make impressive strides toward achieving a comprehensive psychological account of the processes and mechanisms whereby children acquire their mother tongues. Nevertheless, the field's primary focus on distributional information has lead to little progress in elucidating the processes by which children learn to compute meanings beyond the level of single words. This lack of psychologically motivated computational work on semantics poses an important challenge for usage-based computational accounts of acquisition in particular, which hold that grammatical development is closely tied to meaning. In the present review, we trace some initial steps toward answering this challenge through a survey of existing computational models of grammatical development that incorporate semantic information to learn to assign thematic roles and acquire argument structure. We argue that the time is ripe for usage-based computational accounts of grammatical development to move beyond purely distributional features of the input, and to incorporate information about the objects and actions observable in the learning environment. To conclude, we sketch possible avenues for extending previous approaches to modeling the role of semantics in grammatical development. (C) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Prospects for usage-based computational models of grammatical development: argument structure and semantic roles
- Creators
- Stewart M McCauley - Cornell UniversityMorten H Christiansen - Cornell University
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science, Vol.5(4), pp.489-499
- Publisher
- WILEY
- DOI
- 10.1002/wcs.1295
- PMID
- 26308658
- ISSN
- 1939-5078
- eISSN
- 1939-5086
- Number of pages
- 11
- Grant note
- DOI: 10.13039/501100001742, name: United States - Israel Binational Science Foundation, award: 2011107
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 07/01/2014
- Academic Unit
- Communication Sciences and Disorders
- Record Identifier
- 9984258847902771
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