Competition in learning language-based categories

Abstract

Competition is a property of cognitive processing which results from learning that is characterized by the indeterminate encoding of instances and from processing that is characterized by the mutual influence of all activated representations on one another. In the present study, non-French participants learned gender-appropriate adjectives (petit or petite) for a set of 24 French nouns. We found that learning the same set of feminine French nouns could be made more or less difficult when the nouns in the masculine category created more or less competition. One measure from the Competition Model of MacWhinney and Bates (Bates & MacWhinney, 1987, 1989; MacWhinney, 1985, 1987) – cue reliability – predicted these competition effects. We tested an alternative measure based on the encoding of the nouns in memory (termed exemplars) and found that it predicted participants' mean learning performance somewhat more accurately. In the final section of this article, we extend our exemplar-based measure to a connectionist network in order to account for competition and the time course of learning. The network provided a superior fit to the data, with an averageR2= .91.

Properties of Phonological Markers That Affect the Acquisition of Gender-Like Subclasses

“…For instance, in Spanish, agua with the feminine ending -a takes masculine articles, such as el. Some experimental evidence has shown that less overlap in cues for gender subclasses resulted in faster and better learning (Taraban & Roark, 1996).…”

Frequency Effects in Language Processing

“…Brooks, Braine, Catalano, Brody, and Sudhalter (1993) demonstrated that children and adults showed better learning of the noun subclasses of artificial languages when ambiguity was reduced through the presence of a subset of nouns of each subclass sharing a phonological feature than they did in a condition in which the phonological features were less reliable cues in distinguishing the subclasses. Taraban and Roark (1996) manipulated the ambiguity in the mapping of noun forms onto genders in two sets of French nouns. They showed that learning the same set of feminine nouns took longer if the nouns in the masculine class were as a set more ambiguous in the mappings of their noun endings onto gender.…”

The Acquisition of Case Marking by Adult Learners of Russian And German

“…In fact, we are aware of only three attempts to model phenomena occurring in adult L2 learning using connectionist networks. Two of these models (Gasser, 1990;Sokolik & Smith, 1992) are not designed to simulate specific empirical findings, and the third model (Taraban & Roark, 1996) …”