Cognitive inhibition explains children’s production of medial <i>wh</i>-phrases

Liter, Adam; Grolla, Elaine; Lidz, Jeffrey

doi:10.1080/10489223.2021.2023813

Cited by 3 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 77 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Long distance Wh-questions." Liter et al (2022) have claimed that Long_Distance (LD)-whquestions, as in (39) above and repeated below, are to be considered on a par with slips of the tongue, like "bad sack" pronounced as "bad back." (39) Which boy did you say who Mary called <which boy >?…”

Section: Children's Commission Errors and Cognitive Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Undercompression errors as evidence for conceptual primitives

2023

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Meaning First Approach offers a model of the relation between thought and language that includes a Generator and a Compressor. The Generator build non-linguistic thought structures and the Compressor is responsible for its articulation through three processes: structure-preserving linearization, lexification, and compression via non-articulation of concepts when licensed. One goal of this paper is to show that a range of phenomena in child language can be explained in a unified way within the Meaning First Approach by the assumption that children differ from adults with respect to compression and, specifically, that they may undercompress in production, an idea that sets a research agenda for the study of language acquisition. We focus on dependencies involving pronouns or gaps in relative clauses and wh-questions, multi-argument verbal concepts, and antonymic concepts involving negation or other opposites. We present extant evidence from the literature that children produce undercompression errors (a type of commission errors) that are predicted by the Meaning First Approach. We also summarize data that children’s comprehension ability provides evidence for the Meaning First Approach prediction that decompression should be challenging, when there is no 1-to-1 correspondence.

show abstract

Section: Children's Commission Errors and Cognitive Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Undercompression errors as evidence for conceptual primitives

2023

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…More specifically, English-learning children will sometimes produce "medial wh" questions that seem to duplicate the wh-word, with an extra copy appearing in the middle, such as Where do you think where they were walking? Liter et al (2022) found that children's production of medial-wh questions correlated with a measure of their cognitive inhibition abilities. One way to interpret this is that children do in fact know that English does not allow medial wh, but children simply lack the cognitive control sometimes to inhibit the extra wh-word from being produced in the moment.…”

Section: Cognitive Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…The model of Forsythe and Pearl highlighted one effect that cognitive limitations could have on children's acquisition (syntactic or otherwise): children have adult-like knowledge but can't deploy it effectively in the moment. Several child behavioral experiments have been interpreted as demonstrating this effect for syntactic acquisition 4 , including Gerard, Lidz, Zuckerman, and Pinto (2018), Ud Deen, Bondoc, Camp, Estioca, Hwang, Shin, Takahashi, Zenker, and Zhong (2018), and Liter, Grolla, and Lidz (2022.…”

Section: Cognitive Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A third example comes from Liter et al (2022), and also involves immature cognitive inhibition, this time impacting children's production of questions involving wh-words like where. More specifically, English-learning children will sometimes produce "medial wh" questions that seem to duplicate the wh-word, with an extra copy appearing in the middle, such as Where do you think where they were walking?…”

Section: Cognitive Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More generally, prior behavioral work (Gerard et al, 2018;Liter et al, 2022;Ud Deen et al, 2018) has noted the impact of immature non-linguistic systems (e.g., cognitive inhibition) in children's use of their knowledgethat is, how children generate their observed behavior in experimental contexts. So, I think it is useful for future computational cognitive models to consider the impact of these developing nonlinguistic systems when accounting for children's behavior (i.e., the output generation process).…”

Section: Incorporating Non-syntactic Components Into Acquisition Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Computational cognitive modeling for syntactic acquisition: Approaches that integrate information from multiple places

Pearl

2023

J. Child Lang.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Computational cognitive modeling is a tool we can use to evaluate theories of syntactic acquisition. Here, I review several models implementing theories that integrate information from both linguistic and non-linguistic sources to learn different types of syntactic knowledge. Some of these models additionally consider the impact of factors coming from children’s developing non-linguistic cognition. I discuss some existing child behavioral work that can inspire future model-building, and conclude by considering more specifically how to build better models of syntactic acquisition.

show abstract

Errors of Commission in Constructions Involving Movement to the CP Domain

Grolla

2022

Languages

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this overview paper, I discuss data from child languages available in the literature that instantiate errors of commission. I focus on three constructions involving movement to the left periphery of the clause: the production of aux-doubling (where more than one auxiliary verb, either followed by neg or not, is produced in yes/no and Wh-questions), medial Wh-questions (where two Wh-phrases are produced in long-distance Wh-questions), and the production of full resumptive DPs in the relativized position of the relative clause. I claim that these extra elements are not produced at random places, but precisely at the locations where copies (or traces) of the moved elements are claimed to occur. This is taken as an indication of children’s abstract grammatical knowledge.

show abstract

Cognitive inhibition explains children’s production of medial wh-phrases

Cited by 3 publications

References 77 publications

Undercompression errors as evidence for conceptual primitives

Undercompression errors as evidence for conceptual primitives

Computational cognitive modeling for syntactic acquisition: Approaches that integrate information from multiple places

Errors of Commission in Constructions Involving Movement to the CP Domain

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About