Levels of learning: A comparison of concept formation and language acquisition

McDonald, Janet L.; MacWhinney, Brian

doi:10.1016/0749-596x(91)90014-b

Cited by 23 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…Finally, individuals can reach a high degree of skill in a linguistic process, even though the underlying information is uncertain. Our results are also consistent with other findings that support competition effects in learning classifications (e.g., Brooks, Braine, Catalano, Brody, & Sudhalter, 1993;McDonald & MacWhinney, 1991).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

Competition in learning language-based categories

Taraban

Roark

1996

Applied Psycholinguistics

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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.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

Competition in learning language-based categories

Taraban

Roark

1996

Applied Psycholinguistics

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“…It appears so. Experiments using miniature artificial languages have shown that, in the initial stages of acquisition, learners tend to focus on only one cue at a time (Blackwell 1995;MacWhinney and Bates 1989;Matessa and Anderson 2000;McDonald 1986;McDonald and MacWhinney 1991). For example, when cues for determining the agent in sentences include word order, noun animacy and agreement of noun and verb, learners typically decide to focus attention on only one of these as the predictor of interpretation.…”

Section: Pcm and Language Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language Acquisition as Rational Contingency Learning

Ellis

2006

Applied Linguistics

386

248

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This paper considers how fluent language users are rational in their language processing, their unconscious language representation systems optimally prepared for comprehension and production, how language learners are intuitive statisticians, and how acquisition can be understood as contingency learning. But there are important aspects of second language acquisition that do not appear to be rational, where input fails to become intake. The paper describes the types of situation where cognition deviates from rationality and it introduces how the apparent irrationalities of L2 acquisition result from standard phenomena of associative learning as encapsulated in the models of Rescorla and Wagner (1972) and Cheng and Holyoak (1995), which describe how cue salience, outcome importance, and the history of learning from multiple probabilistic cues affect the development of 'learned selective attention' and transfer. methods that abstract this type of information-contingency learning according to the one-way dependency statistic and the Probability Contrast Model (Cheng and Holyoak 1995), and the way that human associative learning accords the predictions of these methods (Shanks 1995). When first and second language acquisition are considered in these terms, L1 acquisition seems much more obviously rational and contingency-sensitive than does L2 acquisition. I lay the foundations for a companion article (Ellis 2006) that describes the types of situation where associative learning deviates from rationality and that argues that the apparent irrationalities of L2 acquisition result from standard phenomena of associative learning: attentional shifting in perceptual learning, latent inhibition, blocking, overshadowing, and other effects of salience, transfer, and inhibition. I describe how 'learned attention' explains these apparently irrational effects, and how theories of animal and human associative learning include selective attention as a key component. The human learning mechanism optimizes its representations of first language from the cumulative sample of first language input. But the initial state for L2 is not a tabula rasa, it is a tabula repleta: the optimal solution for L2 is not that for L1, and L2 acquisition suffers from various types of L1 interference. Thus the shortcomings of the L2 end-state are more rational when seen through the lenses of the L1. THE DESIGN OF AN OPTIMAL WORD PROCESSOR Consider word processing programs you have known. You probably have strong views. Remember the one that crashed at 2 a.m. losing your only copy, the one that took ten minutes to search and replace, the one that required perverse three-letter combination commands, and the one you have now that replaces spellings, styles, and punctuations for you, whether you like it or not, and you still cannot figure how to get it to stop? Besides the obvious requirements for speed and reliability, an optimal word processing program would really know what you wanted to do next, and would present you with your next needed command, file, o...

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“…Hierarchies emerge from situations in which there is conflict between cues, that is, from sentences like The potatoes poison the man but not The man poisons the potatoes . Computing how often cues give the correct answer when they are in conflict determines the strength of cues relative to one another, and this dominance hierarchy reflects cue use among adult native speakers (McDonald, , ; McDonald & MacWhinney, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Determining the Effectiveness of Visual Input Enhancement Across Multiple Linguistic Cues

Comeaux

McDonald

2017

Language Learning

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Visual input enhancement (VIE) increases the salience of grammatical forms, potentially facilitating acquisition through attention mechanisms. Native English speakers were exposed to an artificial language containing four linguistic cues (verb agreement, case marking, animacy, word order), with morphological cues either unmarked, marked in the same color, or marked in different colors. Cue validity (how often a cue was present and correct) and dominance were also manipulated. In Experiment 1, where the morphological cues were low in validity but highly dominant, VIE helped participants to acquire and strengthen one morphological cue (case marking) but not the other (verb agreement). In Experiment 2, where animacy was highly dominant, there was no benefit of VIE; indeed, the same color VIE condition impeded the acquisition of the marked cues. Thus, VIE may only be beneficial in certain circumstances and this may depend on the type of cue as well as its validity and dominance.

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Levels of learning: A comparison of concept formation and language acquisition

Cited by 23 publications

References 36 publications

Competition in learning language-based categories

Competition in learning language-based categories

Language Acquisition as Rational Contingency Learning

Determining the Effectiveness of Visual Input Enhancement Across Multiple Linguistic Cues

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