Contributions of statistical induction to models of syntax acquisition
Item
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Title
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Contributions of statistical induction to models of syntax acquisition
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:5cd8af7b4634:10112
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identifier
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10241
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Creator
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Kam, Xuan-Nga,
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Contributor
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Janet Dean Fodor
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Date
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2009
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Linguistics | auxiliary-inversion | n-gram | phrase-structure | poverty/richness of the stimulus | statistical induction | universal grammar (UG)
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Abstract
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Recent challenges to Chomsky's poverty of the stimulus thesis for language acquisition suggest that children's primary data may carry 'indirect evidence' about linguistic constructions despite containing no instances of them, with the deeper implication that innate knowledge is not needed for grammar acquisition. Reali & Christiansen (2005) demonstrated that a simple bigram model trained on child-directed speech can induce the correct form of auxiliary inversion in certain complex English questions (e.g., Is the boy who is crying hurt?). The significance of this achievement is called into question, however, by Experiments 1-- 6 reported here, which show that the success is highly circumscribed, resting on one particular bigram ( or ) in the grammatical test sentences. The model performs poorly on inversion in related constructions in English and Dutch, which do not afford effective cues accessible to a bigram analysis.;Performance improved modestly when learning resources were added in Experiments 7--15: the learning algorithm was upgraded to a trigram model, corpus size was increased, part-of-speech information was provided. Even so, there were no circumstances in which auxiliary inversion was well-discriminated across other variants (with do-support, with object-gap relatives). This suggests that the n-gram models were not capturing the linguistic generalization that unites the various instances of auxiliary inversion.;This weak performance is unsurprising, since the n-gram learners had no access to information about phrase-structure. Chomsky (1980) emphasized the significance of 'structure dependence' for correct application of the auxiliary-inversion rule. Experiments 16--18 provided some partial phrase-structure information relevant to the task. When noun phrases in the corpus and test sentences were surrounded by NP brackets, performance was extremely poor. But replacing each (maximal) noun phrase by the symbol NP finally yielded success across all three sub-cases of auxiliary inversion tested.;Consequently, based on the results to date, the n-gram challenge to stimulus poverty and UG remains unsubstantiated. However, if it can be shown in future work that an n-gram model is capable of assigning phrase-structure to word-strings, there are grounds for anticipating that it could succeed in extracting the general pattern of auxiliary-inversion.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Linguistics
