Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Conference contribution/Paper › peer-review
Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Conference contribution/Paper › peer-review
}
TY - GEN
T1 - Simultaneous acquisition of vocabulary and grammar in an artificial language learning task
AU - Walker, Neil
AU - Schoetensack, Christine
AU - Monaghan, Padraic
AU - Rebuschat, Patrick
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © CogSci 2017.
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - Learning syntax requires determining relations between the grammatical categories of words in the language, but learning those categories requires understanding the role of words in the syntax. In this study, we examined how this chicken and egg problem is resolved by learners of an artificial language comprising nouns, verbs, adjectives and case markers following syntactic rules. We found that the language could be acquired through cross-situational statistical correspondences with complex scenes and without explicit feedback, and that knowledge was maintained after 24 hours. Results also showed that verbs and word order were the first to be acquired, followed by nouns, adjectives and finally case markers. Interdependencies in learning were found for word order and verbs, and also for nouns, adjectives and case markers. Grammar and vocabulary can be acquired simultaneously, but with distinctive patterns of acquisition - grammar and the role of verbs first, then the vocabulary of other lexical categories.
AB - Learning syntax requires determining relations between the grammatical categories of words in the language, but learning those categories requires understanding the role of words in the syntax. In this study, we examined how this chicken and egg problem is resolved by learners of an artificial language comprising nouns, verbs, adjectives and case markers following syntactic rules. We found that the language could be acquired through cross-situational statistical correspondences with complex scenes and without explicit feedback, and that knowledge was maintained after 24 hours. Results also showed that verbs and word order were the first to be acquired, followed by nouns, adjectives and finally case markers. Interdependencies in learning were found for word order and verbs, and also for nouns, adjectives and case markers. Grammar and vocabulary can be acquired simultaneously, but with distinctive patterns of acquisition - grammar and the role of verbs first, then the vocabulary of other lexical categories.
KW - artificial language learning
KW - grammar
KW - language acquisition
KW - statistical learning
KW - vocabulary
M3 - Conference contribution/Paper
AN - SCOPUS:85059275564
T3 - CogSci 2017 - Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Computational Foundations of Cognition
SP - 1307
EP - 1312
BT - CogSci 2017 - Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
PB - The Cognitive Science Society
T2 - 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Computational Foundations of Cognition, CogSci 2017
Y2 - 26 July 2017 through 29 July 2017
ER -