Generalizing beyond the input: The functions of the constructions matter

Abstract

a b s t r a c tA growing emphasis on statistics in language learning raises the question of whether and when speakers use language in ways that go beyond the statistical regularities in the input. In this study, two groups were exposed to six novel verbs and two novel word order constructions that differed in function: one construction but not the other was exclusively used with pronoun undergoers. The distributional structure of the input was manipulated between groups according to whether each verb was used exclusively in one or the other construction (the lexicalist condition), or whether a minority of verbs was witnessed in both constructions (the alternating condition). Production and judgments results demonstrate that participants tended to generalize the constructions for use in appropriate discourse contexts, ignoring evidence of verb-specific behavior, especially in the alternating condition. Our results suggest that construction learning involves an interaction of witnessed usage together with the functions of the constructions involved.

Language Specific and Language General Motivations of Production Choices: A Multi-Clause and Multi-Language Investigation

“…Implicit learning over these lexical-syntactic-event contingencies (Chang, Dell & Bock, 2006) should promote higher frequency event-lexio-syntactic choices over atypical mappings, including higher frequency lexico-syntactic pairings and event-syntactic pairings. Artificial language studies show that speakers learn event-structure mappings, with consequences for the particular construction used to describe that event (Perek & Goldberg, 2015;in press). Similarly, a natural language example might be seen in Korean, where events in which a patient is adversely affected are more associated with passive structure descriptions than events with non-adverse outcomes (Oshima, 2006;Park, 2005;Song & Choe, 2007).…”

“…Other evidence for fine-grained event-lexico-syntactic learning can be found in studies that suggest that the ease with which a speaker can capture the gist of an event has consequences for structure choice (Konopka & Meyer, 2014), and findings that show statistical learning between events and constructions. In artificial grammar learning studies, Perek and Goldberg (2015;in press) found that speakers learned not only lexico-syntactic patterns of the likelihood of certain verbs appearing in certain syntactic frames, but also learned event-syntactic patterns in the likelihood of certain syntactic forms describing certain event types, and applied this knowledge when using the novel language to describe pictures. The mapping between adverse events and passive sentence structures is a clear natural language example of these same phenomena.…”

“…In addition, there is evidence that aspects of events, such as salience or namability of event entities has consequences for lexical encoding of those entities (Gleitman, January, Nappa & Trueswell, 2007;Knonopka & Meyer, 2014;Myachykov, Thompson, Scheepers & Garrod, 2011;Perek & Goldberg, 2015;in press), which then has consequences for word ordering or structure choice. We believe that this type of combinatorial learning-event-structure, lexico-structure, word co-occurrence, and other-is an important aspect of the sentence production process and can guide many of the choices that speakers make in these, and other sentence production tasks (Perek and Goldberg, 2015; in press). These relationships merit further study.…”

“…in Korean may reveal effects of event-structure patterns, or event-verb-structure mappings on producers' choice of sentence structures (Konopka & Meyer, 2014;Perek & Goldberg, 2015;in press). Finally, we will investigate the degree to which there is consistency in passive use in main and relative clauses within each language.…”

Distribution of verbal overgeneralizations in the Serbian corpus of early child language

“…Overgeneralizations in early child language have attracted a lot of attention in the field of language acquisition (Albright & Hayes, 2003;Ambridge, Freudenthal, Pine, Mills, Clark, & Rowland, 2009;Ambridge, 2010;Ambridge, Pine, Rowland, Chang, & Bidgood, 2013;Anđel, Klampfer, Kilani-Schoch, Dressler, & Kovačević, 2000;Bowerman, 1988;Brooks, Tomasello, Dodson, & Lewis, 1999;Brown, 1973;Katičić, 2003;Kuczaj, 1977;Hržica, 2012;Li & MacWhinney, 1996;MacWhinney, 1976;MacWhinney, 1993;Marcus, Pinker, Ullman, Hollander, Rosen, & Xu, 1992;Slobin, 1973;Perek & Goldberg, 2015;Theakston, 2004). In the domain of verbal morphological overgeneralizations, the typically discussed cases are overregularization errors of the English Past Tense -ed and the German regular -t participle, with the overregularization rate of 4% to 5% (Clahsen & Rothweiler, 1993;Markus et al, 1992).…”