scholarly journals Toddlers exploit referential and syntactic cues to flexibly adapt their interpretation of novel verb meanings

2021 ◽  
Vol 203 ◽  
pp. 105017
Author(s):  
Alex de Carvalho ◽  
Isabelle Dautriche ◽  
Anne-Caroline Fiévet ◽  
Anne Christophe
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Cues

Innateness, abstract names, and syntactic cues in How Children Learn the Meanings of Words

2001 ◽  
Vol 24 (6) ◽  
pp. 1107-1108
Author(s):  
Heidi Harley ◽  
Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
Keyword(s):  
State Of The Art ◽  
The State ◽  
Lexical Acquisition ◽  
Syntactic Cues

Bloom masterfully captures the state-of-the-art in the study of lexical acquisition. He also exposes the extent of our ignorance about the learning of names for non-observables. HCLMW adopts an innatist position without adopting modularity of mind; however, it seems likely that modularity is needed to bridge the gap between object names and the rest of the lexicon.

scholarly journals A Probabilistic Account of Logical Metonymy

2003 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Lapata ◽  
Alex Lascarides
Keyword(s):  
Probabilistic Model ◽  
Logical Form ◽  
Systematic Variation ◽  
Complex Theory ◽  
Easy Problem ◽  
Syntactic Cues ◽  
Large Corpus

In this article we investigate logical metonymy, that is, constructions in which the argument of a word in syntax appears to be different from that argument in logical form (e.g., enjoy the book means enjoy reading the book, and easy problem means a problem that is easy to solve). The systematic variation in the interpretation of such constructions suggests a rich and complex theory of composition on the syntax/semantics interface. Linguistic accounts of logical metonymy typically fail to describe exhaustively all the possible interpretations, or they don't rank those interpretations in terms of their likelihood. In view of this, we acquire the meanings of metonymic verbs and adjectives from a large corpus and propose a probabilistic model that provides a ranking on the set of possible interpretations. We identify the interpretations automatically by exploiting the consistent correspondences between surface syntactic cues and meaning. We evaluate our results against paraphrase judgments elicited experimentally from humans and show that the model's ranking of meanings correlates reliably with human intuitions.

Acquisition of verb meaning through syntactic cues: A comparison of children with autism, children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with typical language development (TLD)

2007 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 411-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
CORY SHULMAN ◽  
AINAT GUBERMAN
Keyword(s):  
Language Development ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Children With Autism ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Primary Language ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms ◽  
Syntactic Cues

The ability to extract meaning through the use of syntactic cues, adapted from Naigles' (1990) paradigm, was investigated in Hebrew-speaking children with autism, those with specific language impairment (SLI) and those with typical language development (TLD), in an attempt to shed light on similarities and differences between the two diagnostic categories, both defined by primary language deficits. Thirteen children with autism and 13 with SLI were matched on chronological age, level of language functioning and gender, and 13 children with TLD were matched to the children in the two clinical groups according to language level, as measured by the CELF-P. Children with autism and children with TLD learned novel words using the syntactical cues in the sentences in which they were presented, whereas children with SLI experienced more difficulty, learning only that which would be expected from chance according to the binomial test. Only 4 of the 13 children with SLI (31%) learned the new words, whereas 11 children with autism and 10 children with TLD learned the novel verb using syntactical cues from the sentence frame. The results are analyzed in terms of possible underlying mechanisms in language acquisition. Children with autism seem to rely on relatively intact syntactic abilities, while children with SLI seem to have marked impairment in using this mechanism in acquiring word meaning. Implications for future research and intervention with preschool children with primary language disorders are discussed.

scholarly journals On the Acquisition of Reading Fluency

1980 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 177-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter A. Schreiber
Keyword(s):  
Reading Instruction ◽  
Reading Fluency ◽  
Repeated Readings ◽  
Crucial Step ◽  
Syntactic Cues ◽  
Similar Reading

The acquisition of reading fluency crucially involves the beginning reader's tacit recognition that s/he must learn to compensate for the absence of graphic signals corresponding to certain prosodie cues by making better use of the morphological and syntactic cues that are preserved. It is argued that the success of the method of repeated readings and similar reading instruction techniques results from the fact that these methods facilitate discovery of the appropriate syntactic phrasing in the written signal. It is suggested that the crucial step comes with the beginning reader's recognition that parsing strategies other than those which rely on prosody or its somewhat haphazard graphic analogues are required in order to read with sense.

A little goes a long way: evidence for a perceptual basis of learning for the noun categories COUNT and Mass

1991 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Maggie Perrin McPherson
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Perceptual Information ◽  
Count Noun ◽  
Mass Noun ◽  
Mass Nouns ◽  
Count Nouns ◽  
Distinct Individual ◽  
Syntactic Cues

ABSTRACTVarious theories of learning for the categories COUNT NOUN and MASS NOUN are compared. It is argued that children assign words to these categories on the basis of intuitions arising from perception that are relevant to Macnamara's (1986) semantic definitions of the categories. These definitions rest on the centrality of identity in the meaning of nouns and the centrality of individuation in the meaning of count nouns but not mass nouns. Empirical evidence is presented that supports the hypothesis that young children classify words as count nouns or mass nouns on the basis of perceptual information about the extension of the words, that is, whether or not the extension consists exclusively of enduring individuals whose discreteness from one another is perceptually salient (count nouns) or not (mass nouns). In an experiment, 48 children with a mean age of 2;10 (S.D. = 0;5) were taught a word for a kind of object (i.e. a perceptually distinct individual) or for a kind of substance (i.e. a collection of small granules). For some children the word was syntactically COUNT and for others it was syntactically MASS. Half of the children received incongruous perceptual and syntactic cues. For most of these children, classification of the word was guided by the object- or substance-like appearance of the stimulus despite the presence of incongruent syntactic cues. Syntactic cues influenced classification of the word for a minority of subjects, most of whom were among the oldest in the sample. It is concluded that perceptual information is critical in early decisions about membership in the categories COUNT NOUN and MASS NOUN.

Multiple constraints and the resolution of Korean null subject anaphor

2013 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sook Whan Cho ◽  
Hyun Jin Hwangbo
Keyword(s):  
First Person ◽  
Null Subjects ◽  
Processing Load ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
Person Features ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Syntactic Cues ◽  
Discourse Topic ◽  
Better Than

This study investigates how Korean adults interpret and identify the referent of a null subject in a narrative text, given different types of topic continuity and person features. We have found that the first-person feature was most accessible in the weak topicality condition in resolving the null subjects, and that the target sentences ending with the first-person modal suffix ‘-lay’ were read and responded to faster, and interpreted more correctly than other types of stimuli involving a third-person modal (‘-tay’) and a person-neutral modal (‘-e’). Furthermore, of the two first-person-specific featured types, the null subjects in the topically weak contexts were processed significantly better than those in the topically strong conditions. It was argued that anaphoric dependency would be formed more discursively than morpho-syntactically in the strong discourse continuity contexts involving no extra processing load due to the shift among multiple eligible candidates. It was also argued that, in the absence of discourse topic assigned strongly to more than one eligible referent in advance, morpho-syntactic cues involved in verb modality are likely to become prominent in the mind of the processor. It is concluded that these main findings support a constraint-based approach, but not the Centering-inspired work.

scholarly journals Pronominal anaphora resolution in Polish: investigating online sentence interpretation using eye-tracking.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agata Wolna ◽  
Zofia Wodniecka ◽  
Joanna Durlik
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Ambiguous Sentence ◽  
Anaphora Resolution ◽  
Overt Pronouns ◽  
Polish Language ◽  
Interpretation Process ◽  
Sentence Interpretation ◽  
Null Pronoun ◽  
Syntactic Cues

The mechanism of anaphora resolution is subject to large cross-linguistic differences. The most likely reason for this is the different sensitivity of pronouns to pragmatic and syntactic cues of reference. In the current study, we explored the mechanism of anaphora resolution in Polish. First, in an ambiguous sentence-interpretation task, we explored the natural biases that occur during the interpretation of null or overt pronouns. More specifically, we investigated whether Polish speakers prefer to relate overt pronouns to antecedents which are in the syntactic position of a subject or an object. Subsequently, we tested the consequences of violation of this bias when tracing the online sentence-interpretation process using eye-tracking. Our results show that Polish speakers have a strong preference for interpreting null pronouns as referring to antecedents in a subject position and for interpreting overt pronouns as referring to antecedents in an object position. However, in online sentence interpretation, only overt pronouns showed sensitivity to violation of the speaker’s natural preferences for a pronoun-antecedent match. We found the null pronoun resolution to be more flexible than that of overt pronouns. Our results indicate that it is much easier for Polish speakers to shift the reference of a null pronoun than an overt one whenever a pronoun is forced to refer to a less-preferred antecedent. We propose that this is because the interpretation of null and overt pronouns is sensitive to the different cues which determine their reference. Overall, in the Polish language, interpretation of a null pronoun seems to be more sensitive to pragmatic cues of reference than syntactic cues of reference, while resolution of overt pronouns relies strongly on syntax-based cues.

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