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

Ben Ambridge; Ramya Maitreyee; Tomoko Tatsumi; Laura Doherty; Shira Zicherman; Pedro Mateo Pedro; Colin Bannard; Soumitra Samanta; Stewart McCauley; Inbal Arnon; Dani Bekman; Amir Efrati; Ruth Berman; Bhuvana Narasimhan; Dipti Misra Sharma; Rukmini Bhaya Nair; Kumiko Fukumura; Seth Campbell; Clifton Pye; Sindy Fabiola Can Pixabaj; Mario Marroquin Peliz; Margarita Julajuj Mendoza

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104310

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

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

Ben Ambridge, Ramya Maitreyee, Tomoko Tatsumi, Laura Doherty, Shira Zicherman, Pedro Mateo Pedro, Colin Bannard, Soumitra Samanta, Stewart McCauley, Inbal Arnon, …

Cognition, Vol.202, pp.104310-104310

09/01/2020

DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104310

PMCID: PMC7397526

PMID: 32623135

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Abstract

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.

Psychology

Psychology, Experimental

Social Sciences

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Title: Subtitle: The crosslinguistic acquisition of sentence structure: Computational modeling and grammaticality judgments from adult and child speakers of English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'
Creators: Ben Ambridge - University of Liverpool
Ramya Maitreyee - University of Liverpool
Tomoko Tatsumi - Kobe University
Laura Doherty - University of Liverpool
Shira Zicherman - Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Pedro Mateo Pedro - Univ Valle Guatemala, Guatemala City, Guatemala
Colin Bannard - University of Liverpool
Soumitra Samanta - University of Liverpool
Stewart McCauley - University of Iowa
Inbal Arnon - Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Dani Bekman - Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Amir Efrati - Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Ruth Berman - Tel Aviv University
Bhuvana Narasimhan - University of Colorado Boulder
Dipti Misra Sharma - International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad
Rukmini Bhaya Nair - Indian Institute of Technology Delhi
Kumiko Fukumura - University of Stirling
Seth Campbell - University of Calgary
Clifton Pye - University of Kansas
Sindy Fabiola Can Pixabaj - Univ Valle Guatemala, Guatemala City, Guatemala
Mario Marroquin Peliz - Univ Valle Guatemala, Guatemala City, Guatemala
Margarita Julajuj Mendoza - Univ Valle Guatemala, Guatemala City, Guatemala
Resource Type: Journal article
Publication Details: Cognition, Vol.202, pp.104310-104310
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104310
PMID: 32623135
PMCID: PMC7397526
NLM abbreviation: Cognition
ISSN: 0010-0277
eISSN: 1873-7838
Publisher: ELSEVIER
Number of pages: 44
Grant note: 681296 / European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's research and innovation programme; European Research Council (ERC) ES/L008955/1 / Economic and Social Research Council; UK Research & Innovation (UKRI); Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC)
Language: English
Date published: 09/01/2020
Academic Unit: Communication Sciences and Disorders
Record Identifier: 9984258843202771

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