A connectionist model of the retreat from verb argument structure overgeneralization

Abstract

AbstractA central question in language acquisition is how children build linguistic representations that allow them to generalize verbs from one construction to another (e.g.,The boy gave a present to the girl→The boy gave the girl a present), whilst appropriately constraining those generalizations to avoid non-adultlike errors (e.g.,I said no to her → *I said her no). Although a consensus is emerging that learners solve this problem using both statistical and semantics-based learning procedures (e.g., entrenchment, pre-emption, and semantic verb class formation), there currently exist few – if any – proposals for a learning model that combines these mechanisms. The present study used a connectionist model to test an account that argues for competition between constructions based on (a) verb-in construction frequency, (b) relevance of constructions for the speaker's intended message, and (c) fit between the fine-grained semantic properties of individual verbs and individual constructions. The model was able not only (a) to simulate the overall pattern of overgeneralization-then-retreat, but also (b) to use the semantics of novel verbs to predict their argument structure privileges (just as real learners do), and (c) to predict the pattern of by-verb grammaticality judgements observed in adult studies.