Cognitive and linguistic biases in morphology learning

Finley, Sara

doi:10.1002/wcs.1467

Cited by 14 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 128 publications

(191 reference statements)

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“…And so on. From studies of children ( Brown, 1973 ; Braine et al, 1990 ; Ambridge et al, 2015 ; Finley, 2018 ) and of adults (e.g., Seidenberg and Plaut, 2014 ; Pollatsek et al, 2015 ), there is good reason to suspect that distributional factors affect L1 and L2 morpheme acquisition and processing.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language Usage and Second Language Morphosyntax: Effects of Availability, Reliability, and Formulaicity

Guo

Ellis

2021

Front. Psychol.

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A large body of psycholinguistic research demonstrates that both language processing and language acquisition are sensitive to the distributions of linguistic constructions in usage. Here we investigate how statistical distributions at different linguistic levels – morphological and lexical (Experiments 1 and 2), and phrasal (Experiment 2) – contribute to the ease with which morphosyntax is processed and produced by second language learners. We analyze Chinese ESL learners’ knowledge of four English inflectional morphemes: -ed, -ing, and third-person -s on verbs, and plural -s on nouns. In Elicited Imitation Tasks, participants listened to length- and difficulty-matched sentences each containing one target morpheme and typed the whole sentence as accurately as they could after a short delay. Experiment 1 investigated lexical and morphemic levels, testing the hypotheses that a morpheme is expected to be more easily processed when it is (1) highly available (i.e., occurring in frequent word-forms), and (2) highly reliable (i.e., occurring in lemma words that are consistently conjugated in the form containing this morpheme). Thirty sentences were made for each morpheme, divided into three Availability-Reliability Distribution (ARD) groups on the basis of corpus analysis in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA; Davies, 2008-): 10 target words high in availability, 10 high in reliability, and 10 low in both reliability and availability. Responses were scored on whether the target morpheme was accurately reproduced given the provision of the correct lemma. A generalized linear mixed-effects logit model (GLMM) revealed fixed effects of morpheme type, availability, and reliability on the accuracy of morpheme provision. There were no effects of lemma frequency. Experiment 2 successfully replicated these results and extended the investigation to explore phrasal formulaicity by manipulating the frequency of the four-word strings in which the morpheme was embedded. GLMMs replicated the effects of word-form availability and reliability and additionally revealed independent phrase-superiority effects where morphemes were better reproduced in contexts of higher string-frequency. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that morpheme acquisition reflects the distributional properties of learners’ experience and the mappings therein between lexis, morphology, phraseology, and semantics. These conclusions support an emergentist view of the statistical symbolic learning of morphology where language acquisition involves the satisfaction of competing constraints across multiple grain-sizes of units.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language Usage and Second Language Morphosyntax: Effects of Availability, Reliability, and Formulaicity

Guo

Ellis

2021

Front. Psychol.

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“…I focus on verbs here for consistency across studies and because they show more interesting inflectional patterns in English than other syntactic categories do. That said, the Zipfian statistical corpus distributions of verb lemmas, inflectional categories, and so on, are the same as those obeyed by other categories (Chan 2008;Finley 2018), which is demonstrated in practice by learning behavior in computational morphology learners (e.g., Lignos et al 2010). The results can therefore be extended to other syntactic categories.…”

Section: Verbal Lexicons Derived From Child-directed Speech and Adultmentioning

confidence: 81%

Estimating child linguistic experience from historical corpora

Kodner

2019

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Child language acquisition is often identified as one of the primary drivers of language change, but the lack of historical child data presents a challenge for empirically investigating its effect. In this work, I observe the relationship between lexicons extracted from modern child-directed speech and those drawn from modern and historical literary corpora in order to better understand when language acquisition can be modeled over historical and non-child corpora as it is over child corpora. The type frequencies of morphophonological and syntactic-semantic patterns occur at similar type frequencies in these corpora among high token frequency items, and furthermore, when a learning algorithm is applied to lexicons sampled from these sources, it consistently achieves the same learning outcomes in each. With appropriate care and pre-processing, modern and historical text corpora are effectively interchangeable with child-directed speech corpora for the purpose of estimating child lexical experience, opening a path for modeling language acquisition where child-directed corpora are not available.

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“…Availability has been widely demonstrated to impact processing, acquisition, and use in both L1 (e.g., Ambridge, Kidd, Rowland, & Theakston, 2015) and L2 (e.g., N. C. Ellis, 2002; N. C. Ellis, Römer, & O'Donnell, 2016). In L1 acquisition, high token frequency surface forms are produced earlier and more accurately in those forms compared to production in other forms and compared to production of other words that are inflected in lower token frequency forms (Aguado‐Orea, 2004; Braine et al., 1990; Finley, 2018; Marchman, 1997). The fact that the frequency of word lemmas plays a lesser role in the accurate retrieval of inflected word‐forms compared to the token frequency of an inflected word‐form itself has been key evidence in the development of emergentist theories of language acquisition that posit chunk‐based learning from usage, construction grammar, and linguistic structure as processing history.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Availability, Contingency, and Formulaicity on the Accuracy of English Grammatical Morphemes in Second Language Writing

Murakami

Ellis

2022

Language Learning

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We investigated whether the accuracy of grammatical morphemes in second language (L2) learners' writing is associated with usage-based distributional factors. Specifically, we examined whether the accuracy of L2 English inflectional morphemes is associated with the availability (i.e., token frequency) and contingency (i.e., token frequency relative to other forms with the same lemma) of the inflected word form as well as the formulaicity of the context in which it occurs (i.e., predictability of the form given the surrounding words). Data drawn from a large-scale learner corpus indicated that contingency is a robust predictor of morpheme accuracy, thereby supporting the usage-based view that language learners are sensitive to distributional properties in their input. Furthermore, the relationship of contingency with accuracy does not necessarily lessen when learners' proficiency rises. Contrary to previous research investigating online processing, we did not identify in our study availability and formulaicity as predictors of accuracy of morpheme production in writing. Keywords usage-based theories; contingency; grammatical morpheme; learner corpusWe thank Masaki Eguchi for drawing our attention to Dunn (2018).

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Cognitive and linguistic biases in morphology learning

Cited by 14 publications

References 128 publications

Language Usage and Second Language Morphosyntax: Effects of Availability, Reliability, and Formulaicity

Language Usage and Second Language Morphosyntax: Effects of Availability, Reliability, and Formulaicity

Estimating child linguistic experience from historical corpora

Effects of Availability, Contingency, and Formulaicity on the Accuracy of English Grammatical Morphemes in Second Language Writing

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