A central tenet of cognitive linguistics is that adults’ knowledge of language consists of a structured inventory of constructions, including various two-argument constructions such as the active, the passive and “fronting” constructions. But how do speakers choose which construction to use for a particular utterance, given constraints such as discourse/information structure and the semantic fit between verb and construction? The goal of the present study was to build a computational model of this phenomenon for two-argument constructions in Mandarin. First, we (...) conducted a grammaticality judgment study with 60 native speakers which demonstrated that, across 57 verbs, semantic affectedness – as determined by further 16 native speakers – predicted each verb’s relative acceptability in the bei-passive and ba-active constructions, but not the Notional Passive and SVO Active constructions. Second, in order to simulate acquisition of these competing constraints, we built a computational model that learns to map from corpus-derived input to an output representation corresponding to these four constructions. The model was able to predict judgments of the relative acceptability of the test verbs in the ba-active and bei-passive constructions obtained in Study 1, with model-human correlations in the region of r = 0.5 and r = 0.3, respectively. Surprisingly, these correlations increased when lexical verb identity was removed; perhaps because this information leads to over-fitting of the training set. These findings suggest the intriguing possibility that acquiring constructions involves forgetting as a mechanism for abstracting across certain fine-grained lexical details and idiosyncrasies. (shrink)

How children go about learning the general regularities that govern language, as well as keeping track of the exceptions to them, remains one of the challenging open questions in the cognitive science of language. Computational modeling is an important methodology in research aimed at addressing this issue. We must determine appropriate learning mechanisms that can grasp generalizations from examples of specific usages, and that exhibit patterns of behavior over the course of learning similar to those in children. Early learning of (...) verb argument structure is an area of language acquisition that provides an interesting testbed for such approaches due to the complexity of verb usages. A range of linguistic factors interact in determining the felicitous use of a verb in various constructions—associations between syntactic forms and properties of meaning that form the basis for a number of linguistic and psycholinguistic theories of language. This article presents a computational model for the representation, acquisition, and use of verbs and constructions. The Bayesian framework is founded on a novel view of constructions as a probabilistic association between syntactic and semantic features. The computational experiments reported here demonstrate the feasibility of learning general constructions, and their exceptions, from individual usages of verbs. The behavior of the model over the timecourse of acquisition mimics, in relevant aspects, the stages of learning exhibited by children. Therefore, this proposal sheds light on the possible mechanisms at work in forming linguistic generalizations and maintaining knowledge of exceptions. (shrink)

A fundamental goal of linguistic theory is to explain how natural languages are acquired. This paper describes some recent findings on how learners acquire syntactic knowledge for which there is little, if any, decisive evidence from the environment. The first section presents several general observations about language acquisition that linguistic theory has tried to explain and discusses the thesis that certain linguistic properties are innate because they appear universally and in the absence of corresponding experience. A third diagnostic for innateness, (...) early emergence, is the focus of the second section of the paper, in which linguistic theory is tested against recent experimental evidence on children's acquisition of syntax. (shrink)

To explain the phenomenon that certain English verbs resist passivization, Pinker proposed a semantic constraint on the passive in the adult grammar: The greater the extent to which a verb denotes an action where a patient is affected or acted upon, the greater the extent to which it is compatible with the passive. However, a number of comprehension and production priming studies have cast doubt upon this claim, finding no difference between highly affecting agent-patient/theme-experiencer passives and non-actional experiencer theme passives. (...) The present study provides evidence that a semantic constraint is psychologically real, and is readily observed when more fine-grained independent and dependent measures are used. We conclude that a semantic constraint on the passive must be incorporated into accounts of the adult grammar. (shrink)

Many studies show a developmental advantage for transitive sentences with familiar verbs over those with novel verbs. It might be that once familiar verbs become entrenched in particular constructions, they would be more difficult to understand (than would novel verbs) in non-prototypical constructions. We provide support for this hypothesis investigating German children using a forced-choice pointing paradigm with reversed agent-patient roles. We tested active transitive verbs in study 1. The 2-year olds were better with familiar than novel verbs, while the (...) 2½-year olds pointed correctly for both. In study 2, we tested passives: 2½-year olds were significantly below chance for familiar verbs and at chance for novel verbs, supporting the hypothesis that the entrenchment of the familiar verbs in the active transitive voice was interfering with interpreting them in the passive voice construction. The 3½-year olds were also at chance for novel verbs but above chance with familiar verbs. We interpret this as reflecting a lessening of the verb-in-construction entrenchment as the child develops knowledge that particular verbs can occur in a range of constructions. The 4½-year olds were above chance for both familiar and novel verbs. We discuss our findings in terms of the relative entrenchment of lexical and syntactic information and to interference between them. (shrink)

All accounts of language acquisition agree that, by around age 4, children’s knowledge of grammatical constructions is abstract, rather than tied solely to individual lexical items. The aim of the present research was to investigate, focusing on the passive, whether children’s and adults’ performance is additionally semantically constrained, varying according to the distance between the semantics of the verb and those of the construction. In a forced‐choice pointing study (Experiment 1), both 4‐ to 6‐year olds (N = 60) and adults (...) (N = 60) showed support for the prediction of this semantic construction prototype account of an interaction such that the observed disadvantage for passives as compared to actives (i.e., fewer correct points/longer reaction time) was greater for experiencer‐theme verbs than for agent‐patient and theme‐experiencer verbs (e.g., Bob was seen/hit/frightened by Wendy). Similarly, in a production/priming study (Experiment 2), both 4‐ to 6‐year olds (N = 60) and adults (N = 60) produced fewer passives for experiencer‐theme verbs than for agent‐patient/theme‐experiencer verbs. We conclude that these findings are difficult to explain under accounts based on the notion of A(rgument) movement or of a monostratal, semantics‐free, level of syntax, and instead necessitate some form of semantic construction prototype account. (shrink)

A central debate in the cognitive sciences surrounds the nature of adult speakers' linguistic representations: Are they purely syntactic (a traditional and widely held view; e.g., Branigan & Pickering, ), or are they semantically structured? A recent study (Ambridge, Bidgood, Pine, Rowland, & Freudenthal, ) found support for the latter view, showing that adults' acceptability judgments of passive sentences were significantly predicted by independent semantic “affectedness” ratings designed to capture the putative semantics of the construction (e.g., Bob was pushed by (...) Wendy is rated as more acceptable than Bob was liked by Wendy, as Bob is more affected in the former). However, because English lacks a separate topicalization construction which provides an alternative means of highlighting the patient (e.g., BOB, Wendy kicked), these findings have a possible alternative explanation: that highly affected entities are more likely to be topicalized, rather than passivized per se. Here we show that, in fact, Ambridge et al.'s () finding replicates in Indonesian, a language with a topicalization construction. The present study therefore provides particularly compelling evidence that grammatical representations have semantic structure. (shrink)