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Learning: Statistical Mechanisms in Language Acquisition

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The Language Phenomenon

Part of the book series: The Frontiers Collection ((FRONTCOLL))

Abstract

The grammatical structure of human languages is extremely complex, yet children master this complexity with apparent ease. One explanation is that we come to the task of acquisition equipped with knowledge about the possible grammatical structures of human languages—so-called “Universal Grammar”. An alternative is that grammatical patterns are abstracted from the input via a process of identifying reoccurring patterns and using that information to form grammatical generalizations. This statistical learning hypothesis receives support from computational research, which has revealed that even low level statistics based on adjacent word co-occurrences yield grammatically relevant information. Moreover, even as adults, our knowledge and usage of grammatical patterns is often graded and probabilistic, and in ways which directly reflect the statistical makeup of the language we experience. The current chapter explores such evidence and concludes that statistical learning mechanisms play a critical role in acquisition, whilst acknowledging holes in our current knowledge, particularly with respect to the learning of ‘higher level’ syntactic behaviours. Throughout, I emphasize that although a statistical approach is traditionally associated with a strongly empiricist position, specific accounts make specific claims about the nature of the learner, both in terms of learning mechanisms and the information that is primitive to the learning system. In particular, working models which construct grammatical generalizations often assume inbuilt semantic abstractions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    More accurately, this word is usually categorized as a “co-verb”. Li and Thompson (1974) (cited in DeLancey 2005) argue that co-verbs are graded in how syntactically “verb like” they are.

  2. 2.

    “Subject-hood” is itself defined in terms of the position that the NP holds within the hierarchical structure.

  3. 3.

    The nineteenth century assumption that non-Western languages are more grammatically primitive is long discredited. This is not to say that particular languages may lack particular grammatical devices. To take an extreme example, Pirahã, a language spoken by a tribe of around a hundred people in a remote area of the Amazon, has been reported (controversially—e.g. Nevins et al. 2009) to lack certain grammatical structures previously thought to be universal. Nevertheless, Everett points out that Pirahã employs a highly complex, intricate grammatical system: “No one should draw the conclusion from this paper that the Pirahã language is in any way ‘primitive’. It has the most complex verbal morphology I am aware of and a strikingly complex prosodic system.” (footnote in Everett 2005).

  4. 4.

    Languages may have different dialects, but there is internal agreement for speakers of that dialect.

  5. 5.

    A variety of techniques exist for assessing whether pre-verbal infants distinguish different types of stimuli. Saffran et al. (1996) used preferential listening where infants indicate their interest in some aural stimuli by looking at a light which they associate with that stimuli. Longer looking times are taken to indicate greater interest in the stimuli. Saffran et al. (1996) found that, after exposure to the nonsense syllable stream, infants showing longer looking times for part-word test items than for word test items (the stimuli were played repeatedly until the infant looked away from the light). The interpretation is that they found the part-words to be more novel and therefore more interesting.

  6. 6.

    This under-estimates, rather than over-estimates, the quantity of language to which a child is likely to be exposed. Hart and Risely (1995) estimate that working class children hear an average of 6 million words per year.

  7. 7.

    Both of these themes have been emphasized by other researchers. See Newport and Aslin (2000) for a statistical learning approach which strongly emphasizes the importance of innate constraints on learning. See Elman et al. (1996) for a connectionist approach to the issue of “innateness” in terms of the architectural make up of networks in different domains; See Seidenberg (1997) for a discussion of the relationship between statistical effects in language learning and language processing.

  8. 8.

    Languages may make much more extensive use of productive morphology than English. For example, in many languages (e.g. many of the Eskimoan languages) entire nouns may be attached to the verb-stem as dependent morphemes, rather than appearing as separate words within the sentence (a phenomenon known as “noun incorporation”).

  9. 9.

    Some more recent versions of this theory allow that at least some regular forms also be stored as whole forms (Pinker 1999; Pinker and Ullman 2002).

  10. 10.

    Although connectionist models are neurally inspired, there is no claim that they constitute a biologically plausible model of neural circuitry.

  11. 11.

    Later models had more complex architectures, including layers of hidden units between the input and output units, and used different learning algorithms.

  12. 12.

    All connectionist models require an error signal to drive learning. The models learn by predicting outputs for given inputs (early on predictions are random guesses), receiving feedback as to what the correct response should be, and then updating the “weights” (which drive the predictions) accordingly. For models which map between phonology and semantics, we are envisioning a child who implicitly compares the sound she would have expected for a given meaning with the one she is hearing, and the meaning she would have expected for a given form with the one that is currently implied.

  13. 13.

    Some researchers have argued that the most frequent form is not always the one that acts as the regular rule (e.g. Marcus et al. 1995). However in such cases the variety of types may be important. Plunkett and Nakisa (1997) demonstrate that a pattern which is not the most frequent can become the most productive in a connectionist model provided that the set of words to which the pattern applies are more dissimilar to each other than is the case for the sets of words associated with alternative patterns. Capturing such variability relies on the use of models with a more complex architecture, including a layer of hidden units between input and output mappings.

  14. 14.

    The critical factor appears to be whether past-tense forms are potentially decomposable, rather than whether the relationship between stem and past tense is regular. For example, slept is traditionally irregular but is nevertheless decomposable into slep \(+\) /t/ (note that this fits Fig. 4.1 as /p/ is voiceless) and it seems to be processed akin to regulars rather than irregulars (Joanisse and Seidenberg 2005).

  15. 15.

    This is a standard methodology for assessing infant preferences for a particular visual stimuli.

  16. 16.

    The data from the Gertner et al. (2006) experiments were not specifically modelled in Chang et al. (2006) but the result is generally consistent with the model’s account.

  17. 17.

    Ultimately we need an account of language learning and language change which explains why word order and case marking are so prevalent as means of encoding thematic information. However from the perspective of learning, the account must also be sufficiently flexible to explain the learning of other additional or alternative devices. For example, sign languages may also employ the modality specific device of directing signs with the signing space (e.g. moving a GIVE gesture towards a particular person to indicate that they are the recipient).

  18. 18.

    Since I have found that people outside of this discipline (particularly middle class academically minded parents, accustomed to explicitly correcting their children’s grammar) have difficulty accepting this point, it is worth highlighting. To further see that parental correction does not account for our knowledge of verb syntax, consider that many of the verbs which are ungrammatical in this construction are Latinate verbs (e.g. donate). It seems unlikely that such verbs are widely used (and therefore corrected) in childhood, yet we all known their syntactic restrictions.

  19. 19.

    Although Everett (2005) controversially claims that Pirahã lacks the ability to encode recursion, a particular type of hierarchical structure whereby the same phrase may be embedded within a phrase of the same type.

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the following people for helpful discussions and/or comments on earlier drafts of the chapter: Adele Goldberg, Franklin Chang, Joanne Taylor, Jennifer Thomson and Edward Longhurst.

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, Conventry, CV4 7AL, UK

    Elizabeth Wonnacott

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    K. Smith

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Wonnacott, E. (2013). Learning: Statistical Mechanisms in Language Acquisition. In: Binder, PM., Smith, K. (eds) The Language Phenomenon. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36086-2_4

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