Unfaithful conduct: A competence-based explanation of asymmetries between production and comprehension

Abstract

Children's production skills in their native language do not always develop in tandem with their comprehension skills. In some cases, children's comprehension is adult-like, while their production is still poor. In other cases, the situation is the other way around and children's production is adult-like, while their comprehension is still poor. Optimality Theory is able to provide a competence-based explanation for these asynchronies in children's language development because optimization is direction-sensitive. As a result, an OT grammar may yield a different mapping between form and meaning in production than in comprehension. This paper explores which configurations of constraints predict such asymmetries between production and comprehension. It is argued that asymmetries arise from various configurations of constraints and are resolved by the OT learning mechanisms of constraint reranking and bidirectional optimization.

The acquisition of compositional meaning

“…Based on the same direction-sensitivity of the grammar, an optimality-theoretic grammar also predicts reverse asymmetries where production precedes comprehension, depending on the particular configuration of constraints [24]. Two relevant constraints for explaining word order variation are an animacy constraint requiring the subject to be higher in animacy than the object and a word order constraint requiring the subject to linearly precede the object [25,26].…”

Production Before Comprehension in the Emergence of Transitive Constructions in Dutch Child Language

“…Contrasting with these two approaches, the constraint-based approach Optimality Theory (Prince andSmolensky, 1993/2004) predicts that for certain linguistic forms comprehension precedes production (Smolensky, 1996), whereas for other forms production precedes comprehension (Hendriks, 2016), depending on the linguistic constraints involved. According to Optimality Theory, the realization and interpretation of words and sentences follows from the interplay between conflicting constraints of various sorts.…”

“…In comprehension, the input is a form and the output is the optimal meaning from a set of potential meanings for that form. Asymmetries between production and comprehension arise from the different directions of optimization in production and comprehension (Smolensky, 1996;Hendriks, 2014Hendriks, , 2016. Because the constraints are output-oriented and either evaluate the output in relation to other outputs (markedness constraints), or evaluate the output in relation to the input (faithfulness constraints), the same outputoriented constraints can have different effects in production and comprehension, as the output differs in production and comprehension.…”

“…Because of its potential to have grammatical effects, in Optimality Theory the animacy constraint is considered to be a constraint of the grammar, on a par with the word order constraint. It is this animacy constraint that has been argued to give rise to different effects in comprehension and production in child language (Hendriks et al, 2005;Hendriks, 2014Hendriks, , 2016.…”

“…This explains why English-speaking adults always select the first noun phrase as the subject in comprehension, thereby satisfying the stronger word order constraint but sometimes violating the weaker animacy constraint. If English-speaking children entertain a different ranking of the constraints and incorrectly assume the animacy constraint to be the strongest of the two constraints, the interaction between these two constraints will give rise to non-adult-like performance in comprehension, but adult-like performance in production (Hendriks et al, 2005;Hendriks, 2014Hendriks, , 2016. In comprehension, the stronger animacy constraint will be satisfied even if this would result in violation of the weaker word order constraint, resulting in selection of the animate noun phrase as the subject.…”