Rights statement: The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Developmental Psychology 73, 2014, © ELSEVIER.
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Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Do as I say, not as I do
T2 - a lexical distributional account of English locative verb class acquisition
AU - Twomey, Katherine
AU - Chang, Franklin
AU - Ambridge, Ben
N1 - The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Developmental Psychology 73, 2014, © ELSEVIER.
PY - 2014/9
Y1 - 2014/9
N2 - Children overgeneralise verbs to ungrammatical structures early in acquisition, but retreat from these overgeneralisations as they learn semantic verb classes. In a large corpus of English locative utterances (e.g., the woman sprayed water onto the wall/wall with water), we found structural biases which changed over development and which could explain overgeneralisation behaviour. Children and adults had similar verb classes and a correspondence analysis suggested that lexical distributional regularities in the adult input could help to explain the acquisition of these classes. A connectionist model provided an explicit account of how structural biases could be learned over development and how these biases could be reduced by learning verb classes from distributional regularities.
AB - Children overgeneralise verbs to ungrammatical structures early in acquisition, but retreat from these overgeneralisations as they learn semantic verb classes. In a large corpus of English locative utterances (e.g., the woman sprayed water onto the wall/wall with water), we found structural biases which changed over development and which could explain overgeneralisation behaviour. Children and adults had similar verb classes and a correspondence analysis suggested that lexical distributional regularities in the adult input could help to explain the acquisition of these classes. A connectionist model provided an explicit account of how structural biases could be learned over development and how these biases could be reduced by learning verb classes from distributional regularities.
KW - Language acquisition
KW - Verb semantics
KW - Distributional learning
KW - Connectionist modelling
KW - Corpus analysis
U2 - 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2014.05.001
DO - 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2014.05.001
M3 - Journal article
VL - 73
SP - 41
EP - 71
JO - Cognitive Psychology
JF - Cognitive Psychology
SN - 0010-0285
ER -