Productivity and the acquisition of gender

Björnsdóttir, Sigríður

doi:10.1017/s0305000920000732

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 38 publications

(35 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The linear regression and step function analyses indicated that the learning was categorical, rather than gradient. That is, infants responded quantally, as did older children in Bjornsdottir (2021). The lack of productivity gradience in infants is consistent with the regularization performance (rather than probability matching) shown in 5-to 7-year-old children (Hudson Newport, 2005, 2009;Austin et al, 2022).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 69%

“…Recent corpus studies showed support for TP-predicted (un)productiveness and quantalness of morphosyntactic patterns in adult speech (Pearl and Sprouse, 2021;van Tuijl and Coopmans, 2021;Henke, 2022) and in historical texts (Kodner, 2023). Furthermore, experiments on English-speaking 5-8-year-olds' and Icelandicspeaking 2.5-to-6-year-olds' production of morphological patterns (Schuler et al, 2016;Bjornsdottir, 2021) and on Russian-speaking 4-6-year-olds' ordinal acquisition (de Vries et al, 2021) provided evidence for this theory. Yang (2016)'s analysis of the CHILDES corpora showed that children's productivity and overgeneralization of English verb morphology was fully predictable by TP; notably, TP also correctly predicted the finding that children almost never produced irregularizations such as "wipe-wope" (only 0.02% such analogy errors in Xu and Pinker, 1995).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The threshold of rule productivity in infants

Shi,

Emond

2023

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Most learning theories agree that the productivity of a rule or a pattern relies on regular exemplars being dominant over exceptions; the threshold for productivity is, however, unclear; moreover, gradient productivity levels are assumed for different rules/patterns, regular or irregular. One theory by Yang, the Tolerance Principle (TP), specified a productivity threshold applicable to all rules, calculated by the numbers of total exemplars and exceptions of a rule; furthermore, rules are viewed as quantal, either productive or unproductive, with no gradient levels. We evaluated the threshold and gradience-quantalness questions by investigating infants’ generalization. In an implicit learning task, 14-month-olds heard exemplars of an artificial word-order rule and exceptions; their distributions were set closed to the TP-threshold (5.77) on both sides: 11 regular exemplars vs. 5 exceptions in Condition 1 (productiveness predicted), and 10 regular exemplars vs. 6 exceptions in Condition 2 (unproductiveness predicted). These predictions were pitted against those of the statistical majority threshold (50%), a common assumption which would predict generalization in both conditions (68.75, 62.5%). Infants were tested on the trained rule with new exemplars. Results revealed generalization in Condition 1, but not in Condition 2, supporting the TP-threshold, not the statistical majority threshold. Gradience-quantalness was assessed by combined analyses of Conditions 1-2 and previous experiments by Koulaguina and Shi. The training across the conditions contained gradually decreasing regular exemplars (100, 80, 68.75, 62.5, 50%) relative to exceptions. Results of test trials showed evidence for quantalness in infants (productive: 100, 80, 68.75%; unproductive: 62.5, 50%), with no gradient levels of productivity.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 69%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

The threshold of rule productivity in infants

Shi,

Emond

2023

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This learning model has been shown to correctly predict generalizations in corpus data from a wide range of different languages (e.g. Fernández-Dobao and Herschensohn 2019; Merkuur et al 2020;Garcia 2019;Björnsdóttir, 2021) and childhood behavior in certain experimental settings (Schuler et al 2016). We expect our findings to be compatible with other generative learning models.…”

Section: Methodmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of gender in the acquisition of the Serbian case system

Pophristic

Schuler

2021

Proc Ling Soc Amer

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Serbo-Croatian is marked for seven cases and has a noun class vs. gender distinction. Given the complexity of the inflectional system, we look at Serbo-Croatian as a case study in case acquisition. We explore different correlations available in the input that children could leverage to acquire the case system in Serbo-Croatian. We ask three main questions: 1) does a noun’s gender predict the noun’s nominative singular suffix? 2) does a noun’s nominative singular suffix predict the noun’s gender? and 3) does a noun’s noun class predict the noun’s gender? Specifically, we ask whether the language input provides children with sufficient evidence to form these three productive generalizations. To test this, we apply the Tolerance Principle (Yang, 2016) to a corpus of 270 inflected Serbian nouns. Within this set of data, we find that: 1) all nominative singular suffixes productively predict a gender; 2) all genders productively predict a nominative singular suffix (with the exception of the neuter gender which predicts two suffixes); and 3) two of the three noun classes predict a single gender. We conclude that the input provides sufficient evidence for these productive correlations and we argue that children can leverage these generalizations to infer the declension patterns or gender of novel nouns. We discuss how, given these findings, children could acquire most of the inflectional system by focusing on gender as a categorization system for nouns, without needing to posit abstract categories of noun class.

show abstract

“…Following these case studies, Pophristic and Schuler (2021) employ the TP to draw predictions about the productivity of noun suffixes in Serbian, although they do not actually test these predictions with child language data. Björnsdóttir (2021) applies the TP to generate and test predictions about the acquisition of noun inflection in Icelandic, using corpus and experimental data to argue that children follow patterns corresponding to productive and unproductive rules predicted by the TP.…”

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rules and exceptions: A Tolerance Principle account of the possessive suffix in Northern East Cree

Henke

2022

J. Child Lang.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Debate around inflectional morphology in language acquisition has contrasted various rule- versus analogy-based approaches. This paper tests the rule-based Tolerance Principle (TP) against a new type of pattern in the acquisition of the possessive suffix -im in Northern East Cree. When possessed, each noun type either requires or disallows the suffix, which has a complex distribution throughout the lexicon. Using naturalistic video data from one adult and two children – Ani (2;01–4;03) and Daisy (3;08–5;10) – this paper presents two studies. Study 1 applies the TP to the input to extrapolate two possible sets of nested rules for -im and make predictions for child speech. Study 2 tests these predictions and finds that each child’s production of possessives over time is largely consistent with the predictions of the TP. This paper finds the TP can account for the acquisition of the possessive suffix and discusses implications for language science and Cree language communities.

show abstract

Productivity and the acquisition of gender

Cited by 7 publications

References 38 publications

The threshold of rule productivity in infants

The threshold of rule productivity in infants

The role of gender in the acquisition of the Serbian case system

Rules and exceptions: A Tolerance Principle account of the possessive suffix in Northern East Cree

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About