Learning to order words: A connectionist model of heavy NP shift and accessibility effects in Japanese and English

Chang, Franklin

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2009.07.006

Cited by 89 publications

(102 citation statements)

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“…Evidence from English, Portuguese and German suggests that children's acquisition of relative clauses may depend on patterns in main clause utterances, with relative clauses that maintain more word order and morphological features of main clauses generally being easier to learn both within and between languages (Brandt, Diessel & Tomasello, 2008;Kidd & Bavin, 2002;Kidd, Brandt, Lieven & Tomasello, 2007). These results are consistent with the model presented in Chang (2009), which suggests that representations across similar structures, like the English main clause and the short-before-long dative, are shared, and it is these shared representations, and the relative frequencies of these shared representation that bring about short-before-long preferences in English and long-before-short preferences in Japanese. These results suggest a number of different regularities across sentence types: surface-level sentence word order, morphology or event structure may contribute to the observed phenomenon of active and passive relative clause frequencies in a language mirroring those of main clause active and passive sentence frequencies.…”

Section: Implications For Lexical Syntactic and Event Knowledge In supporting

confidence: 86%

“…For example, in language production, the frequencies with which verbs appear in alternative syntactic contexts has consequences for sentence production choices of sentences containing those verbs (Arnold, Wasow, Asudeh & Alrenga, 2004;Bernolet & Hartsuiker, 2010;Stallings et al, 1998) as do the distributional pairings between noun animacy and sentence structure (Bresnan & Ford, 2010;Reali & Christiansen, 2007;Gennari & MacDonald, 2009). Like comprehenders, language producers implicitly learn statistical patterns of their linguistic environment, and this information affects production choices and accuracy (Boyd & Goldberg, 2011;Chang, 2009;Dell, Reed, Adams & Meyer, 2000;Warker & Dell, 2006). Language users also have learned the statistics of their visual environment, with consequences for codability in picture description tasks, where, for example, recognition of a ball is influenced by recognition of a throwing action and vice versa (Almor et al, 2009;Handy et al, 2003;Knoeferle & Crocker, 2006;Palmer, 1975).…”

Section: Multiple Forces Shaping Production Choicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Montag

Matsuki

Kim

et al. 2017

Collabra: Psychology

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Cross-linguistic studies allow for analyses that would be impossible in a single language. To better understand the factors that underlie sentence production, we investigated production choices in main and relative clause production tasks in three languages: English, Japanese and Korean. The effects of both non-linguistic attributes (such as conceptual animacy) and language specific properties (such as word order) were investigated. Japanese and Korean are structurally similar to each other but different from English, which allowed for an investigation of the production consequences of non-linguistic attributes in different typological or word order contexts (when Japanese and Korean speakers make similar production choices that are unlike those of English speakers), as well as production choices that differ despite typological similarity (when Japanese and Korean speakers make different choices). Speakers of all three languages produced more passive utterances when describing animate entities, but the overall rate of passives varied by task and language. Further, the sets of items that were most likely to elicit passives varied by language, with Japanese and Korean speakers more likely to produce passives when patients were adversely affected by the depicted event. These results suggest a number of factors that contribute to language production choices across three languages, and how general cognitive constraints on sentence production may interact with the structure of a specific language.Keywords: Sentence production; relative clauses; passives; cross-linguistic analysis; Japanese; Korean An English speaker in a coffee shop, desiring coffee, might say, "A coffee," or "I'll take coffee, a small one, please," or "May I have a small?" Even in this highly constrained context, many different utterances can convey the speaker's message. This flexibility of language production, and speakers' abilities to navigate the high number of lexical and syntactic options to converge on a single utterance form, are central features of the production process and have become important topics of research. The research presented here addresses these issues by comparing production across three different languages and two different sentence constructions. This approach provides a detailed picture of how production flexibility-the availability of alternative syntactic and lexical options to convey a message-can vary across language and message, and how these factors shape speakers' implicit choices of words and sentence structures, providing insight into how language production processes settle on an utterance plan over alternative possibilities. Multiple Forces Shaping Production ChoicesLanguage production researchers have long recognized that the properties of both words and sentence structures affect producers' implicit utterance choices. Recently, several researchers have aimed to characterize a range of these effects by contrasting two means by which speakers converge on a single string of to-be-articulated words. Sentence const...

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Section: Implications For Lexical Syntactic and Event Knowledge In supporting

confidence: 86%

Section: Multiple Forces Shaping Production Choicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Montag

Matsuki

Kim

et al. 2017

Collabra: Psychology

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“…Furthermore, its predictions about early structural biases in preferential looking, namely that causative-transitive mappings are learned earlier than non-causativeintransitive mappings, have been confirmed in several syntactic bootstrapping studies in different languages (Gertner & Fisher, 2012;Matsuo, Kita, Shinya, Wood, & Naigles, 2012;Noble, Rowland, & Pine, 2011). More broadly, the model provides a general account of language acquisition and sentence production, learning typologically-different languages such as English, Japanese, and German (Chang, 2009;Chang, Baumann, Pappert, & Fitz, 2014) and successfully models a range of findings from the child and adult production literature, for example structural priming, conceptual/lexical accessibility, heavy NP shift and the accessibility hierarchy (Chang, 2009;Chang et al, 2006;Fitz, Chang, & Christiansen, 2011;Rowland, Chang, Ambridge, Pine, & Lieven, 2012).…”

Section: A Connectionist Model Of Acquisition Of the English Locativementioning

confidence: 72%

“…Because lexical competition at the choice point can influence structural choice (Bock, 1982;Chang, 2009), the model had to relay information about its lexical choices back to the sequencing system. It did this by passing back the winning Produced Word output as the next Previous Word input.…”

Section: Model Architecturementioning

confidence: 99%

Do as I say, not as I do: A lexical distributional account of English locative verb class acquisition

Twomey

Chang

Ambridge

2014

Cognitive Psychology

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Children overgeneralise verbs to ungrammatical structures early in acquisition, but retreat from these overgeneralisations as they learn semantic verb classes. In a large corpus of English locative utterances (e.g., the woman sprayed water onto the wall/wall with water), we found structural biases which changed over development and which could explain overgeneralisation behaviour. Children and adults had similar verb classes and a correspondence analysis suggested that lexical distributional regularities in the adult input could help to explain the acquisition of these classes. A connectionist model provided an explicit account of how structural biases could be learned over development and how these biases could be reduced by learning verb classes from distributional regularities.

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“…These two differences can be seen in the Japanese version of 'John gave the book to Mary', which would be 'John-ga Mary-ni book-o gave' (when expressed with English content words). Chang [2] trained the Dual-path model on either English or Japanese input, and the model was able to acquire both languages to a similar degree. More importantly, the model was able to explain cross-linguistic differences in production biases in the two languages.…”

Section: The Dual-path Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

The P-chain: relating sentence production and its disorders to comprehension and acquisition

Dell

Chang

2014

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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402

360

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This article introduces the P-chain, an emerging framework for theory in psycholinguistics that unifies research on comprehension, production and acquisition. The framework proposes that language processing involves incremental prediction, which is carried out by the production system. Prediction necessarily leads to prediction error, which drives learning, including both adaptive adjustment to the mature language processing system as well as language acquisition. To illustrate the P-chain, we review the Dual-path model of sentence production, a connectionist model that explains structural priming in production and a number of facts about language acquisition. The potential of this and related models for explaining acquired and developmental disorders of sentence production is discussed.

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Learning to order words: A connectionist model of heavy NP shift and accessibility effects in Japanese and English

Cited by 89 publications

References 72 publications

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

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

Do as I say, not as I do: A lexical distributional account of English locative verb class acquisition

The P-chain: relating sentence production and its disorders to comprehension and acquisition

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