Variability, negative evidence, and the acquisition of verb argument constructions

Journal of Child Language

Volumn 37, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 607-642

  Perfors, Amy ^a   Tenenbaum, Joshua B ^b   Wonnacott, Elizabeth ^c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE   (Australia)

^b MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

^c UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ADULT; ALGORITHM; ARTICLE; BAYES THEOREM; COMPUTER SIMULATION; FACTUAL DATABASE; HUMAN; INFANT; LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT; LEARNING; LINGUISTICS; PROBABILITY; SPEECH PERCEPTION;

ADULT; ALGORITHMS; BAYES THEOREM; CHILD LANGUAGE; COMPUTER SIMULATION; DATABASES, FACTUAL; HUMANS; INFANT; LEARNING; LINGUISTICS; PROBABILITY; SPEECH PERCEPTION;

EID: 77952550460     PISSN: 03050009     EISSN: 14697602     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0305000910000012     Document Type: Article

References (43)

1. Alishahi, A. & Stevenson, S. (2008). A probabilistic model of early argument structure acquisition. Cognitive Science 32(5), 789-834.
2. Allen, J. & Seidenberg, M. (1999). The emergence of grammaticality in connectionist networks. In B. MacWhinney (ed.), Emergence of language, 115-152 Hillsdale, NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
3. Ambridge, B., Pine, J., Rowland, C. & Young, C. (2008). The effect of verb semantic class and verb frequency (entrenchment) on children's and adults' graded judgements of argument-structure overgeneralization errors. Cognition 106, 87-129.
4. Baker, C. (1979). Syntactic theory and the projection problem. Linguistic Inquiry 10, 533-581
5. Berwick, R. (1985). The acquisition of syntactic knowledge. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
6. Bowerman, M. (1988). The no negative evidence problem: How do children avoid constructing an overly general grammar? In J. Hawkins (ed.), Explaining language universals, 73-101. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
7. Braine, M. (1971). On two types of models of the internalization of grammars. In D. Slobin (ed.), The ontogenesis of grammar: A theoretical symposium, 153-186 New York, NY: Academic Press.
8. Braine, M. & Brooks, P. (1995). Verb argument structure and the problem of avoiding an overgeneral grammar. In M. Tomasello & W. Merriman (eds), Beyond names of things : Young children's acquisition of verbs, 353-376 Hillsdale, New Jersey : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
9. Brooks, P. & Tomasello, M. (1999). How children constrain their argument structure constructions. Language 75, 720-781
10. Brooks, P., Tomasello, M., Dodson, K. & Lewis, L. (1999). Young children's overgeneralizations with fixed transitivity verbs. Child Development 70, 1325-1337
11. Brown, R. (1973). A first language : The early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
12. Chater, N. & Vitànyi, P. (2007). 'Ideal learning' of natural language: Positive results about learning from positive evidence. Journal of Mathematical Psychology 51(3), 135-163
13. Chouinard, M. & Clark, E. (2003). Adult reformulations of child errors as negative evidence. Journal of Child Language 30, 637-669
14. Dominey, P. (2003). Learning grammatical constructions in a miniature language from narrated video events. In R. Alterman & D. Kirsch (eds), Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 354-359 Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
15. Dowman, M. (2000). Addressing the learnability of verb subcategorizations with Bayesian inference. In L. Gleitman & A. Joshi (eds), Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 107-112. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
16. Fisher, C., Gleitman, H. & Gleitman, L. (1991). On the semantic content of subcategorization frames. Cognitive Psychology 23, 331-392
17. Gillette, J., Gleitman, H., Gleitman, L. & Lederer, A. (1991). Human simulations of vocabulary learning. Cognition 73, 153-176
18. Gleitman, L. (1990). The structural sources of word learning. Language Acquisition 1, 3-55.
19. Goldberg, A. (1995). A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
20. Goldberg, A. (2006). Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
21. Goodman, N. (1955). Fact, fiction, and forecast. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
22. Gordon, P. (1990). Learnability and feedback. Developmental Psychology 26(2), 217-220
23. Gropen, J., Pinker, S., Hollander, M. & Goldberg, R. (1991). Syntax and semantics in the acquisition of locative verbs. Journal of Child Language 18(1), 115-151
24. Gropen, J., Pinker, S., Hollander, M., Goldberg, R. & Wilson, R. (1989). The learnability and acquisition of the dative alternation in English. Language 65(2), 203-257.
25. Hsu, A. (2009). Differential use of implicit negative evidence in generative and discriminative language learning. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 22.
26. Kemp, C., Perfors, A. & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2007). Learning overhypotheses with hierarchical Bayesian models. Developmental Science 10(3), 307-321.
27. Levin, B. (1993). English verb classes and alternations : A preliminary investigation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
28. MacWhinney, B. (1987). The competition model. In B. MacWhinney (ed.), Mechanisms of language acquisition, 249-308. Hillsdale, NJ : Erlbaum.
29. MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project : Tools for analyzing talk, 3rd edn. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
30. MacWhinney, B. (2004). A multiple process solution to the logical problem of language acquisition. Journal of Child Language 31, 883-914.
31. Matthews, D., Lieven, E., Theakston, A. & Tomasello, M. (2005). The role of frequency in the acquisition of the English word. Cognitive Development 201, 121-136
32. Mazurkewich, I. & White, L. (1984). The acquisition of the dative alternation : Unlearning overgeneralizations. Cognition 16, 261-283
33. Mitchell, D. (1987). Lexical guidance in human parsing : Locus and processing characteristics. In M. Coltheart (ed.), Attention and performance XII: The psychology of reading, 601-681. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
34. Morgan, J. & Demuth, K. (1996). Signal to syntax : Bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquistition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
35. Onnis, L., Roberts, M. & Chater, N. (2002). Simplicity : A cure for overregularizations in language acquisition? In W. Gray & C. Schunn (eds), Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 720-725 Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
36. Pinker, S. (1984). Language learnability and language development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
37. Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and cognition : The acquisition of argument structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
38. Snedeker, J. & Trueswell, J. (2004). The developing constraints on parsing decisions : The role of lexical-biases and referential scenes in child and adult sentence processing. Cognitive Psychology 49, 238-299
39. Theakston, A. (2004). The role of entrenchment in children's and adults' performance limitations on grammaticality judgment tasks. Cognitive Development 19, 15-34.
40. Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language : A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
41. Trueswell, J., Tanenhaus, M. & Kello, C. (1993). Verb-specific constraints in sentence processing: Separating effects of lexical preference from garden-paths. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 19, 528-553
42. Wonnacott, E., Newport, E. & Tanenhaus, M. (2008). Acquiring and processing verb argument structure : Distributional learning in a miniature language. Cognitive Psychology 56, 165-209.
43. Wonnacott, E. & Perfors, A. (2009). Constraining generalisation in artificial language learning : Children are rational too. Poster presented at 22nd Annual CUNY conference on human sentence processing, New York.