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  • Twomey, Chang & Ambridge 2016 preprt

    Rights statement: This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Cognition. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Cognition, 153, 2016 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.05.001

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Lexical distributional cues, but not situational cues, are readily used to learn abstract locative verb-structure associations.

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<mark>Journal publication date</mark>1/08/2016
<mark>Journal</mark>Cognition
Volume153
Number of pages16
Pages (from-to)124-139
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date14/05/16
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Children must learn the structural biases of locative verbs in order to avoid making overgeneralisation errors (e.g., *I filled water into the glass). It is thought that they use linguistic and situational information to learn verb classes that encode structural biases. In addition to situational cues, we examined whether children and adults could use the lexical distribution of nouns in the post-verbal noun phrase to assign novel verbs to locative classes. In Experiment 1, children and adults used lexical distributional cues to assign verb classes, but were unable to use situational cues appropriately. In Experiment 2, adults generalised distributionally-learned classes to novel verb arguments, demonstrating that distributional information can cue abstract verb classes. Taken together, these studies show that human language learners can use a lexical distributional mechanism that is similar to that used by computational linguistic systems that use large unlabelled corpora to learn verb meaning.

Bibliographic note

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Cognition. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Cognition, 153, 2016 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.05.001