Book•
Language Acquisition: The State of the Art
16 Sep 2009-
TL;DR: This book discusses language acquisition through the lens of grammar, semantics, and ontology, and investigates the role of universals in the acquisition of gerunds and its role in lexical and syntactic development.
Abstract: List of contributors Preface Part I. The Logic of Language Acquisition: 1. Language acquisition: the state of the state of the art Lila R. Gleitman and Eric Wanner Part II. Preconditions for Language Acquisition: 2. The resilience of recursion: a study of a communication system developed without a conventional language model Susan Goldin-Meadow 3. Why short subjects are harder to find than long ones Charles Read and Peter Schreiber 4. On mechanisms of language acquisition: can features of the communicative environment account for development? Marilyn Shatz 5. Universal and particular in the acquisition of language Dan I. Slobin Part III. The Development of Grammar: 6. Functionalist approaches to grammar Elizabeth Bates and Brian MacWhinney 7. On what cases categories there are, why they are, and how they develop: an amalgam of a priori considerations, speculation and evidence from children Martin D. S. Braine and Judith A. Hardy 8. The child's construction of grammatical categories Michael Maratsos 9. The role of universals in the acquisition of gerunds Thomas Roeper 10. A principle theory for language acquisition Kenneth Wexler Part IV. Semantic and Lexical Development: 11. Reorganisational processes in lexical and syntactic development Melissa Bowerman 12. Semantic development: the state of the art Susan Carey 13. The young word maker: a case study of innovation in the child's lexicon Eve V. Clark Part V. Alternative Conceptions of Acquisition: 14. Some implications of the nonspecific bases of language T. G. Bever 15. Task specificity in language learning? Evidence from speech perception and American Sign Language Elissa L. Newport References Index.
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TL;DR: A new general theory of acquired similarity and knowledge representation, latent semantic analysis (LSA), is presented and used to successfully simulate such learning and several other psycholinguistic phenomena.
Abstract: How do people know as much as they do with as little information as they get? The problem takes many forms; learning vocabulary from text is an especially dramatic and convenient case for research. A new general theory of acquired similarity and knowledge representation, latent semantic analysis (LSA), is presented and used to successfully simulate such learning and several other psycholinguistic phenomena. By inducing global knowledge indirectly from local co-occurrence data in a large body of representative text, LSA acquired knowledge about the full vocabulary of English at a comparable rate to schoolchildren. LSA uses no prior linguistic or perceptual similarity knowledge; it is based solely on a general mathematical learning method that achieves powerful inductive effects by extracting the right number of dimensions (e.g., 300) to represent objects and contexts. Relations to other theories, phenomena, and problems are sketched.
6,014 citations
Cites background from "Language Acquisition: The State of ..."
...The Problem of Induction...
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...How experiential evidence is brought to bear in setting its options also has yet to be well specified, although developmental psycholinguists have provided a great deal of relevant evidence (see e.g. Slobin, 1982)....
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TL;DR: The authors argued that the best theory for describing this domain is not a traditional system of discrete roles (Agent, Patient, Source, etc.) but a theory in which the only roles are two cluster-concepts called PROTO-AGENT and PROTO -PATIENT, each characterized by a set of verbal entailments: an argument of a verb may bear either of the two proto-roles (or both) to varying degrees, according to the number of entailments of each kind the verb gives it.
Abstract: As a novel attack on the perennially vexing questions of the theoretical status of thematic roles and the inventory of possible roles, this paper defends a strategy of basing accounts of roles on more unified domains of linguistic data than have been used in the past to motivate roles, addressing in particular the problem of ARGUMENT SELECTION (principles determining which roles are associated with which grammatical relations). It is concluded that the best theory for describing this domain is not a traditional system of discrete roles (Agent, Patient, Source, etc.) but a theory in which the only roles are two cluster-concepts called PROTO-AGENT and PROTO-PATIENT, each characterized by a set of verbal entailments: an argument of a verb may bear either of the two proto-roles (or both) to varying degrees, according to the number of entailments of each kind the verb gives it. Both fine-grained and coarse-grained classes of verbal arguments (corresponding to traditional thematic roles and other classes as well) follow automatically, as do desired 'role hierarchies'. By examining occurrences of the 'same' verb with different argument configurations—e.g. two forms of psych predicates and object-oblique alternations as in the familiar spray/load class—it can also be argued that proto-roles act as defaults in the learning of lexical meanings. Are proto-role categories manifested elsewhere in language or as cognitive categories? If so, they might be a means of making grammar acquisition easier for the child, they might explain certain other typological and acquisitional observations, and they may lead to an account of contrasts between unaccusative and unergative intransitive verbs that does not rely on deriving unaccusatives from underlying direct objects.
2,752 citations
01 Jan 1992
TL;DR: One of the strengths of scientific inquiry is that it can progress with any mixture of empiricism, intuition, and formal theory that suits the convenience of the investigator as discussed by the authors, which is the case in many sciences.
Abstract: One of the strengths of scientific inquiry is that it can progress with any mixture of empiricism, intuition, and formal theory that suits the convenience of the investigator. Many sciences develop for a time as exercises in description and empirical generalization. Only later do they acquire reasoned connections within themselves and with other branches of knowledge. Many things were scientifically known of human anatomy and the motions of the planets before they were scientifically explained.
2,510 citations
Cites background from "Language Acquisition: The State of ..."
...…linguistics, this problem is called the "poverty of the stimuli" (Chomsky, 1975); in semantics, it is called the problem of "referential ambiguity" (Gleitman & Wanner, 1982); in developmental psychology, it is called the "need for constraints on induction" (Carey, 1985a); in perception, they say…...
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TL;DR: It is proposed that concepts are coherent to the extent that they fit people's background knowledge or naive theories about the world and to structure the attributes that are internal to a concept.
Abstract: The question of what makes a concept coherent (what makes its members form a comprehensible class) has received a variety of answers. In this article we review accounts based on similarity, feature correlations, and various theories of categorization. We find that each theory provides an inadequate account of conceptual coherence (or no account at all) because none provides enough constraints on possible concepts. We propose that concepts are coherent to the extent that they fit people's background knowledge or naive theories about the world. These theories help to relate the concepts in a domain and to structure the attributes that are internal to a concept. Evidence of the influence of theories on various conceptual tasks is presented, and the possible importance of theories in cognitive development is discussed.
2,471 citations
Cites background or result from "Language Acquisition: The State of ..."
...Finally, in considering children's errors in learning noun and verb meanings, Carey (1982) argued that children's problems arise not from faulty linguistic abilities, but rather from an impoverished conceptual structure....
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...For a variety of reasons, this theory is no longer widely accepted in its original form (see Carey, 1982; E. Clark, 1983; Richards, 1979), a trend that is consistent with our previous arguments about the insufficiency of feature-based models of concepts....
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...Carey (1982) also provided a critique of the notion of feature accretion as an explanation of semantic development....
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...(Carey, 1982, p. 374) Of course, the relation cuts both ways: An impoverished conceptual structure might prevent someone from learning a word fully, but in other cases, language learning influences the conceptual structure....
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...In her own studies of biological concepts (as described in Carey, 1982), Carey followed the development of concepts like animal and living thing....
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Book•
01 Jan 1993TL;DR: Implicit learning as mentioned in this paper is the process by which knowledge about the ralegoverned complexities of the stimulus environment is acquired independently of conscious attempts to do so, and it can be used implicitly to solve problems and make accurate decisions about novel stimulus circumstances.
Abstract: I examine the phenomenon of implicit learning, the process by which knowledge about the ralegoverned complexities of the stimulus environment is acquired independently of conscious attempts to do so. Our research with the two, seemingly disparate experimental paradigms of synthetic grammar learning and probability learning is reviewed and integrated with other approaches to the general problem of unconscious cognition. The conclusions reached are as follows: (a) Implicit learning produces a tacit knowledge base that is abstract and representative of the structure of the environment; (b) such knowledge is optimally acquired independently of conscious efforts to learn; and (c) it can be used implicitly to solve problems and make accurate decisions about novel stimulus circumstances. Various epistemological issues and related prob1 lems such as intuition, neuroclinical disorders of learning and memory, and the relationship of evolutionary processes to cognitive science are also discussed. Some two decades ago the term implicit learning was first used to characterize how one develops intuitive knowledge about the underlying structure of a complex stimulus environment (Reber, 1965, 1967). In those early writings, I argued that implicit learning is characterized by two critical features: (a) It is an unconscious process and (b) it yields abstract knowledge. Implicit knowledge results from the induction of an abstract representation of the structure that the stimulus environment displays, and this knowledge is acquired in the absence of conscious, reflective strategies to learn. Since then, the evidence in support of this theory has been abundant, and many of the details of the process have been sharpened. This article is an overview of this evidence and an attempt to extend the general concepts to provide some insight into a variety of related processes such as arriving at intuitive judgments, complex decision making, and, in a broad sense, learning about the complex covariations among events that characterize the environment. Put simply, this is an article about learning. It seems curious, given the pattern of psychological investigation of the middle decades of this century, that the topic of learning should be so poorly represented in the contemporary literature in cognitive psychology. The energies of cognitive scientists have been invested largely in the analysis and modeling of existing knowledge rather than in investigations of how it was acquired. For example, in an important recent article on the general topic of unconscious memorial systems, Schacter (1987) never came to grips with the distinction between implicit learning and implicit memory. The latter, the focus of his review, was dealt with historically, characterized, out
2,438 citations