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,Colin Bannard,Amir Efrati,Shira Zicherman,Tomoko Tatsumi,Kumiko Fukumura,Mario Marroquín Pelíz,Pedro Mateo Pedro,Bhuvana Narasimhan,Dani Bekman,Ramya Maitreyee,Inbal Arnon,Rukmini Bhaya Nair,Margarita Julajuj Mendoza,Laura Doherty,Clifton Pye,Dipti Misra Sharma,Sindy Fabiola Can Pixabaj,Seth Campbell,Soumitra Samanta,Stewart M Mccauley ,Ruth A Berman

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104310

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.

Highlights

IntroductionJust what is it that distinguishes human language from the often-rather-sophisticated communication systems of other species?
We investigated the extent to which predictor variables instantiating the verb-semantics, entrenchment and preemption hypotheses could explain the pattern of judgments within each language
Observed conlinearity between the entrenchment and preemption predictors meant that the coefficients would essentially be uninterpretable

Summary

Introduction

Just what is it that distinguishes human language from the often-rather-sophisticated communication systems of other species? A number of distinguishing features have been proposed, including recursion (e.g., Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002) and shared intentionality (e.g., Tomasello, 2003), but perhaps the most important and widely-agreed upon feature is productivity: Only human languages allow speakers to generate utterances that are entirely novel, that have never been encountered in the history of our species, yet are readily comprehended by any member of the relevant speech community (e.g., Chomsky, 1957; Hockett, 1960). The difficulty is that few of the productive generalizations that children must form are truly exceptionless. Children must somehow learn not to apply a particular generalization to exception items, while – at the same time – continuing to apply this generalization to items with which it is consistent, including items for which this generalization is novel

Objectives

Results

Conclusion