I Forgot but It’s Okay: Learning about Island Constraints under Child-Like Memory Constraints
Niels Dickson, Richard Futrell, Lisa Pearl
January 2024 

A remarkable feat of children’s developing language abilities is their success in acquiring complex syntactic patterns in their native language(s) at a young age. Specifically, English-speaking children as young as four (De Villiers et al., 2008) (and perhaps younger (Hirzel, 2022)) seem to interpret wh-dependencies in adult- like ways. To investigate how children are able to acquire this knowledge from their input, we start with a wh-dependency learning theory that has been formally articulated and evaluated via computational cognitive modeling (Dickson et al., 2022), and found to succeed at matching observed behavior that signals knowledge of wh-dependencies. Here, we evaluate this theory’s ability to handle more realistic learning scenarios that incorporate children’s memory limitations. We find that modeled learners who implement the learning theory of Dickson et al. (2022), while also contending with memory constraints, can still capture most of the previously observed behavior.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007849 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	BUCLD proceedings
keywords:	syntactic islands, acquisition, fragment grammars, computational cognitive models, bayesian inference, syntax
Downloaded:	272 times

 

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