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Language Acquisition in the Absence of Explicit Negative Evidence: How Important is Starting Small? (1999)
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| Venue: | Cognition |
| Citations: | 92 - 6 self |
BibTeX
@ARTICLE{Rohde99languageacquisition,
author = {Douglas Rohde and David C. Plaut},
title = {Language Acquisition in the Absence of Explicit Negative Evidence: How Important is Starting Small?},
journal = {Cognition},
year = {1999},
volume = {72},
pages = {67--109}
}
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Abstract
It is commonly assumed that innate linguistic constraints are necessary to learn a natural language, based on the apparent lack of explicit negative evidence provided to children and on Gold's proof that, under assumptions of virtually arbitrary positive presentation, most interesting classes of languages are not learnable. However, Gold's results do not apply under the rather common assumption that language presentation may be modeled as a stochastic process. Indeed, Elman (1993, Cognition) demonstrated that a simple recurrent connectionist network could learn an artificial grammar with some of the complexities of English, including embedded clauses, based on performing a word prediction task within a stochastic environment. However, the network was successful only when either embedded sentences were initially withheld and only later introduced gradually, or when the network itself was given initially limited memory which only gradually improved. This finding has been taken as support...
Keyphrases
explicit negative evidence language acquisition stochastic process innate linguistic constraint limited memory word prediction task apparent lack simple recurrent connectionist network artificial grammar arbitrary positive presentation interesting class common assumption stochastic environment language presentation embedded clause natural language
