Learning to order words: A connectionist model of heavy NP shift and accessibility effects in Japanese and English

Abstract

Languages differ from one another and must therefore be learned. Processing biases in word order can also differ across languages. For example, heavy noun phrases tend to be shifted to late sentence positions in English, but to early positions in Japanese. Although these language differences suggest a role for learning, most accounts of these biases have focused on processing factors. This paper presents a learning-based account of these word order biases in the form of a connectionist model of syntax acquisition that can learn the distinct grammatical properties of English and Japanese while, at the same time, accounting for the cross-linguistic variability in processing biases in sentence production. This account demonstrates that the incremental nature of sentence processing can have an important effect on the representations that are learned in different languages.