Which English: The Science, Part 1

I've gotten a number of questions about the science behind our WhichEnglish quiz. Actually, I had intended to post a more detailed discussion days ago, but I got distracted by other matters.

In this project, we are looking at three interrelated issues:

1. How does the age at which you start learning a language affect how well you learn that language?
2. How is learning a foreign language affected by the language you already know?
3. How are the grammars of different English dialects related?

And of course, we train an algorithm to predict participants' native language and dialect of English based on their answers. I return to that at the end.

Age of Acquisition

Although WhichEnglish has a few scientific targets, age-of-acquisition effects were the original inspiration. Everybody knows that the older you are when you start learning a foreign language, the harder it is to learn. One possibility is that there is a critical period: Up to some age, you can learn a language like a native. After that age, you will never learn it perfectly. The other possibility is that there is no specific period for language learning; rather, language-learning simply gets a little harder every day.

The evidence is unclear. Ideally, you would compare people who started learning some language (say, English) from birth with people who started as 1 year-olds and people who started as 2 year-olds, etc. Or maybe you would want something even finer-grained. The problem is that you need a decent number of people at each age (50 would be a good number), and it quickly becomes infeasible.

One study that came close to this ideal used census data. The authors -- led by Kenji Hakuta -- realized that the US census asks foreign-born residents to rate their own English ability. The authors compared this measure of English ability with the year of immigration (an approximation for the age at which the person started learning English). Their results showed a steady decline, rather than a critical period.

We are trying to build on this work in a few ways. For one, it would be nice to confirm (or disconfirm) the previous results with a more sensitive measure of English ability. So rather than just ask people how good their English is, we have them take a test. Also, we are getting more precise information about when the participant started learning English and in what contexts.

Also, there is good reason to suspect that age-of-acquisition affects different aspects of language differently. Studies have shown that even people who began learning a language as toddlers have detectable -- if very subtle -- accents. However, people who start learning foreign languages as adults usually report that learning vocabulary isn't so hard. Grammar seems to be somewhere in between. The Hakuta study didn't distinguish these different aspects of language.

WhichEnglish focuses on grammar. We also have a vocabulary quiz to look at vocabulary. A pronunciation test is in the works.

First language effects

When we started thinking about studying age-of-acquisition effects, we quickly realized a problem. We needed questions that would be difficult for someone who learned English as a second language. But which aspects of grammar are difficult seems to depend on your first language. I personally have difficulty with aspect in Russian because the English aspect system is much less complex. However, dealing with tense in Russian is relatively straightforward, since the Russian tense system is much less complex that English's.

Since we didn't know for sure what the language backgrounds of our participants would be, we wanted a range of questions that covered the different kinds of problems people with different backgrounds might have.

As we combed the literature, we realized that it was pretty fragmented. One study might say that grammar rule x is difficult for Japanese-speakers and grammar rule y is difficult for German-speakers, but there would be no information on how Japanese-speakers fare with grammar rule y and how German-speakers manage with grammar rule x. This actually makes sense: Most studies look at speakers of one or at most a handful of language backgrounds. This is partly a matter of research interest (the researchers are usually interested in some particular language) and partly a matter of feasibility (in a lab setting, you can only test so many participants). We realized that our study, by virtue of being on the Internet and recruiting people from a wide array of backgrounds, would provide an opportunity to get more systematic data across a large number of languages.

This is pretty exploratory. We don't have strong hypotheses. But as data comes in, we will be analyzing to see what we get, and we will report it here.

The Grammars of English

In designing our age-of-acquisition study, we realized a second problem. Correct English grammar varies across different dialects. In Newfoundland, you can say "Throw me down the stairs the hammer," but most places, you can't. (I have heard that this is said in parts of Rhode Island, too, but only anecdotally.) We don't want to count a late-learner of English who says "Throw me down the stairs the hammer" as not knowing English if in fact she lives in Newfoundland!

So what we really wanted were questions for which the correct answer is the same in all English dialects. But we didn't know what those were. Again, the literature was only partly helpful here. For obvious reasons, researchers tend to be interested in understanding peculiar constructions specific to certain dialects, rather than recording what is the same everywhere (boring).

We picked out a lot of grammar rules that we at least had no reason to believe varied across dialect. But we also realized that there was an opportunity here to study differences across dialects. So we included a subset of items that we thought probably would be different across dialects so that we can explore relationships across dialects.

The algorithm

When you take the quiz, at the end we give you our best guess as to what your native language is and what dialect of English you speak. How is that related to the three issues I just discussed?

It's deeply related. The best way of proving that you understand how people's understanding of grammar is affected by the age at which they started learning, their first language (if any), and the dialect of English they speak, is to show that you can actually distinguish people based on their grammar. In fact, training an algorithm to make just that distinction is a common way of analyzing and exploring data.

There are also obvious practical applications for an algorithm that can guess someone's language background based on their grammar (for education, localization of websites, and so on).

But an important reason we included the algorithm's predictions in the quiz itself was to present the results of the study to participants in the study as the study goes on. Certainly, you can read this and other blog posts I've written about the project as well. But it probably took you as long to read this post as to do the quiz. The algorithm and its predictions boil down the essence of the study in a compelling way. Based on the (numerous) emails I have gotten, it has inspired a lot of people to think more about language. Which is great. The best Web-based studies are a two-way street, where the participants get something out of the experience, too.

We chose the particular algorithm we use because it runs quickly and could be trained on very little data. You can read more about it by clicking on "how it works" in our data visualization. We are testing out more sophisticated algorithms as well, which are likely to do much better. Algorithms for detecting underlying patterns is actually a specialty of my laboratory, and this will be a fantastic dataset to work with. These algorithms mostly run too slowly to use as part of the quiz (nobody wants to wait 10 minutes for their results), but the plan is to describe those results in future posts and/or in future data visualizations.

In conclusion

If you have any questions about this work, please ask in the comments below or shoot me an email at gameswithwords@gmail.com.

Children don't always learn what you want

Someone has not been watching his/her speech around this little girl.



It's clear she has some sense as to what the phrase means, but clearly she's got the words wrong. But she is treating this phrase as compositional (notice how she switches between "his" and "my").

One of my younger brothers went around for a couple months saying "ship" whenever anything bad happened. But unfortunately we don't have that on video.

A Critical Period for Learning Language?

If you bring adults and children into the lab and try teaching them a new language, adults will learn much more of the language much more rapidly than the children. This is odd, because probably one of the most famous facts about learning languages -- something known by just about everyone whether you are a scientist who studies language or not -- is that adults have a lot less success at learning language than children. So whatever it is that children do better, it's something that operates on a timescale too slow to see in the lab. 

This makes studying the differences between adult and child language learners tricky, and a lot less is known that we'd like. Even the shape of the change in language learning ability is not well-known: is the drop-off in language learning ability gradual, or is there a sudden plummet at a particular age? Many researchers favor the latter possibility, but it has been hard to demonstrate simply because of the problem of collecting data. The perhaps most comprehensive study comes from Kenji Hakuta, Ellen Bialystok and Edward Wiley, who used U.S.A. Census data from 2,016,317 Spanish-speaking immigrants and 324,444 Chinese-speaking* immigrants, to study English proficiency as a function of when the person began learning the language. 

Their graph shows a very gradual decline in English proficiency as a function of when the person moved to the U.S.

Unfortunately, the measure of English proficiency wasn't very sophisticated. The Census simply asks people to say how well they speak English: "not at all", "not well", "well", "very well", and "speak only English". This is better than nothing, and the authors show that it correlates with a more sophisticated test of English proficiency, but it's possible that the reason the lines in the graphs look so smooth is that this five-point scale is simply too coarse to show anything more. The measure also collapses over vocabulary, grammar, accent, etc., and we know that these behave differently (your ability to learn a native-like accent goes first).

A New Test

This was something we had in mind when devising The Vocab Quiz. If we get enough non-native Speakers of English, we could track English proficiency as a function of age ... at least as measured by vocabulary (we also have a grammar test in the works, but that's more difficult to put together and so may take us a while yet). I don't think we'll get two million participants, but even just a few thousand would be enough. If English is your second (or third or fourth, etc.) language, please participate. In addition to helping us with our research and helping advance the science of language in general, you will also be able to see how your vocabulary compares with the typical native English speaker who participates in the experiment.

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Hakuta, K., Bialystok, E., & Wiley, E. (2003). Critical Evidence: A Test of the Critical-Period Hypothesis for Second-Language Acquisition Psychological Science, 14 (1), 31-38 DOI: 10.1111/1467-9280.01415



*Yes, I know: Chinese is a family of languages, not a single language. But the paper does not report a by-language breakdown for this group.

Do You Speak Korean?

Learning new languages is hard for many reasons. One of those reasons is that the meaning of an individual word can have a lot of nuances, and the degree to which those nuances match up with the nuances of similar words in your first language can make learning the new language easier; the degree to which the nuances diverge can make learning the
new language harder.

In a new experiment, we are looking at English-speakers learning Korean and Korean-speakers learning English. In particular, we are studying a specific set of words that previous research has suggested give foreign language learners a great deal of difficulty.

We are hoping that we will be able to track how knowledge of these words develops as you move from being a novice to a fluent speaker. For this, we will need to find a lots of people who are learning Korean, as well as Korean-speakers who are learning English. If you are one, please participate.

The experiment is called "Trials of the Heart". You can find it here.

We do also need monolingual English speakers (people whose first and essentially only language is English) for comparison, so if you that's you, you are welcome to participate, too!

Image credit

New Experiment: The Language & Memory Test

There is a close relationship between language and memory, since of course whenever you use words and grammar, you have to access your memory for those words and that grammar. If you couldn't remember anything, you couldn't learn language to begin with.

The relationship between language and memory is not well understood, partly because they tend to be studied by different people, though there are a few labs squarely interested in the relationship between language and memory, such as the Brain and Language Lab at Georgetown University.

This week, I posted a new experiment, "The Language & Memory Test", which explores the relationship between memory and language. The experiment consists of two components. One is a memory test. At the end, you will see your score and how it compares with other people who took the test. This test is surprisingly hard for how simple it seems.

In the other part, you will try to learn to use some new words. We'll be studying the relationship between different aspects of your memory performance and how you learn these new words. As always, there will be a bit more explanation at the end of the experiment. When the experiment is done and the results are known, there will be a full description of them and what we learned here at the blog and at GamesWithWords.org.

Try the Language & Memory test here.

New Experiment: Collecting Fancy Art

Over the last few years, we've run a lot of experiments online at GamesWithWords.org, resulting so far in four publications, with a number of others currently under review at various journals. Most of these have experiments have focused on how people process and interpret language. I just posted a new experiment (Collecting Fancy Art) that is more squarely focused on learning language. Language learning experiments are somewhat tricky to do online, since they tend to take longer than the 5-10 minute format of online experiments, but they are important.

One of the most salient truths about language is that language has to be learned. This is clearly pretty hard, or other animals would be able to do it and we'd already have computers that were pretty good at language. But just how the learning process happens is a bit of a mystery, partly because language is a complex, interconnected system. When you learn one word, it affects how you use other words.

In this experiment, you will simultaneously learn the meanings of three different words. We're interested in seeing how your understanding of these words develops. As always, you'll learn more about the experiment at the end. And check back here in the future: After the experiment is completed, the results will be posted here.

The experiment is called "Collecting Fancy Art". You can find it here.

Update on DuoLingo

I have been using Duolingo for a few months to brush up my Spanish. I have generally found it to be pretty useful and a significant improvement over my strategy was to listen to the news in Spanish. So I was interested to see a report on the effectiveness of Duolingo.

Even though most people enrolled in the study did not actually spent much time using DuoLingo (only a handful managed more than 30 hours in two months), there was a statistically significant improvement. How much improvement? The report estimates that a person with no prior knowledge of Spanish would be able to place into 2nd-semester Spanish after 34 hours with Duolingo.

Reasons for sketicism

While this is certainly good to see, Duolingo goes a bit far in concluding that this means Duolingo is more effective than a university. It might be true, but these aren't the kind of data you would want to show it. What we would want to know is how much the participants in this study would have learned if they had taken one semester of college Spanish. I doubt the answer is "exactly enough to place into 2nd-Semester Spanish on the study's placement test."One reason is that placement tests are designed to tell you whether someone has enough background to take a class, not whether they know exactly as much as the typical student starting that class. A second reason is that the study population is very different from your typical undergrad. In fact, nearly 3/4 of them had graduated from college already, and over 1/4 had a graduate degree. These are people who are highly experienced at education and who have been very successful, and either reason might make you expect them to learn faster than your typical college freshman. Then there's the fact that the study doesn't seem to control for whether they are using any other methods to learn Spanish at the same time (like taking a class).

I suppose my main reason for being skeptical is that while I find Duolingo incredibly useful for learning nouns and adjectives and for practicing what I already know, I've found it less useful in terms of learning grammar or learning verbs. Grammar is not explicitly taught at all (you're suppose to work out the rules of grammar from seeing example sentences). There are a lot of Spanish verbs with irregular endings, and Duolingo gives you no information about those (except what you might glean from seeing an example sentence with such a verb).

Perhaps this is closer to how children learn (though not really -- Duolingo is all about translation, and generally children don't learn their first language by learning how to translate it into another language!), but I suspect there's a reason that language classes the world over explicitly teach you grammar rules. Babies might not need it, but adults seem to.

What Duolingo is good for

This doesn't mean I've got it in for Duolingo. As I said, I've been using it and intend to keep on using it. Much of Duolingo consists of trying to create new sentences in Spanish and then getting feedback on whether you did it right or not. This is fantastic practice, maybe even better than what you'd get in an immersion environment (in which you create sentences but don't always get feedback), and I highly recommend it to anyone trying to revive moribund language skills or as an addition to an ongoing course of study. I just don't see it standing all by itself.

The other useful tidbit from this study: Most people who started using Duolingo quit, and quit quickly. Which is a reminder that the limiting factor in language learning is not what textbook or website you use, but your own dedication.

Boston University Conference on Language Development: Day 2

This year marks my 7th straight BUCLD, the major yearly language acquisition conference. See previous posts for my notes on Day 1 and Day 3.

Verbing nouns

Many if not all English nouns can be turned into verbs. The verb's meaning is related to the noun, but not always in the same way. Consider "John milked the cow" and "John watered the garden". In the first face, John extracts a liquid from the cow; in the second, he adds liquid to the garden.

Maybe this is just something we have to learn in each case, but people seem to have strong intuitions about new verbs. Let's say that there is a substance called "dax" that comes from the dax tree. If I were to dax a tree, am I taking dax out of the tree or adding dax to the tree? Most people think the first definition is right. Now let's say there is something called "blick" which is a seasoning that people often add to soup. If I blick some soup, most people think I'm adding blick to the soup, not taking blick out of the soup. (There are other types of noun-derived verbs as well, but they are a topic for another time.)

These examples suggest a hypothesis: if a noun refers to a substance that usually comes from a specific source, then the derived verb probably refers to the action of extracting that substance. If the noun refers to something that doesn't come from any particular source but is often added to things, then the derived verb refers to that process of adding the substance to something.

Mahesh Srinivasan of UCSD presented joint work with David Barner in which they tested this hypothesis. Probably the most informative of the experiments was one with made-up nouns, much like my "dax" and "blick" examples above. Interestingly, while children were pretty sure that "to blick" meant "put blick on something" (the experiment involved several such nouns, and the children had strong intuitions about all of them), they were much less sure what "to dax" (and similar verbs) meant. Other experiments also showed that young children have more difficulty understanding existing substance-extraction noun-derived verbs (to milk/dust/weed/etc.) than substance-adding noun-derived verbs (to water/paint/butter). And interestingly, English has many more of the latter type of verb than the former.

So, as usual, answer one question leads to another. While they found strong support for their hypothesis about why certain noun-derived verbs have the meanings they do, they also found that children find the one kind of verb easier to learn than the other, which demands an explanation. They explored a few hypotheses. One has to do with the "goal" bias described in previous work by Laura Lakusta and colleagues: generally, when infants watch a video in which an object goes from one location to another, they pay more attention to and remember better the location the object ended up at than the location it came from. Whatever the answer, learning biases -- particularly in young children -- are interesting because they provide clues as to the structure of the mind.

Verb biases in structure priming

One of the talks most-mentioned among the folks I talked to at BUCLD was one on structural priming by Michelle Peter (with Ryan Blything, Caroline Rowland, and Franklin Chang, all of the University of Liverpool). The idea behind structural priming is that using a particular syntactic structure once tends to lead to using it more again in the future (priming). The structure under consideration here was the so-called dative alternation:

(1) Mary gave a book to John.
(2) Mary gave John a book

Although the two sentences mean the same thing (maybe -- that's a long post in itself), notice the difference in word order between (1) and (2). The former is called the "prepositional object" structure, and the second is called the "double object" structure. Some time ago, it was discovered that if people use a given verb (e.g., give) in the prepositional object form once, they are more likely to use that verb in the same form again next time they have to use that verb (and vice versa for the double object form). More recently, it was discovered that using one verb (e.g., give) in the prepositional object form made it more likely to use another verb (e.g., send) in that same form (and again vice versa for the double object form). This suggests that the syntactic form itself is represented in some way that is (at least partially) independent of the verb in question, which is consistent with theories involving relatively abstract grammar.

Or maybe not. This has been highly controversial over the last number of years, with groups of researchers (including the Rowland group) showing evidence of what they call a "lexical boost" -- priming is stronger from the same verb to the same verb, which they take as evidence that grammar is at least partly word-specific. Interestingly, they have now found that children do *not* show the same lexical boost (which, if I remember correctly, has been found by other researchers from the "abstract grammar" camp before, but not by those in the "lexically-specific grammar" camp).

This seems consistent with a theory of grammar on which children start out with relatively general grammatical structures, but as you get older you tend to memorize particularly frequent constructions -- thus, as far as processing goes, grammar becomes increasingly lexically-specific as you get older (though the abstract structures are still around in order to allow for productivity). This is the opposite of the speakers' favored theory, one which grammar becomes more abstract as you get older. They did find some aspects of their data that they thought reflected lexically-specific processing in children; it's complex so I won't discuss it here (I didn't have time to get it all down in my notes and don't want to make a mistake).

There was also a talk by Kyae-Sung Park (collaborator: Bonnie D. Schwartz, both of the University of Hawai'i) on the Korean version of the dative alternation, finding that the more common form is learned earlier by second-language learners of Korean. I was interested in finding out more about the structure of Korean, but I don't know the second-language acquisition research well enough to integrate their main findings into the larger literature.

Other studies

There were many other good talks. The ones I saw included a study by Wang & Mintz, arguing that previous studies that looked at the overlap in the contexts in which different determiners occur in child speech -- which had been used to suggest that young children don't have an abstract grammatical category "determiner" -- were confounded by the small size of the corpora used. If you use a similarly small corpus of adult speech, you'd come to the same conclusion. [The analyses were much cooler and more detailed than this quick overview can get across.]

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Lakusta, L., Wagner, L., O'Hearn, K., and Landau, B. (2007). Conceptual Foundations of Spatial Language: Evidence for a Goal Bias in Infants Language Learning and Development, 3 (3), 179-197 DOI: 10.1080/15475440701360168

Boston University Conference on Language Development: Day 3

This post continues my series on this years' BUCLD. While conferences are mostly about networking and seeing your friends, I also managed to attend a number of great talks.

Autism and homophones

Hugh Rabagliati got the morning started with a study (in collaboration with Noemi Hahn and Jesse Snedeker) of ambiguity (homophone) resolution. One of the better-known theories of Autism is that people with Autism have difficulty thinking about context (the "weak central coherence theory"). Rabagliati has spent much of his career so far looking at how people use context to interpret ambiguous words, so he decided to check to see whether people with Autism had any more difficulty than typically-developing folk. (Note that many people with Autism have general language delays. Presumably people with language delays will have trouble on language tasks. This work focused on people with Autism who have roughly normal syntax and semantics.)

Participants listened to sentences with homophones (e.g., "bat") that were either had very constraining contexts (e.g., "John fed the bat that he found in the forest") or not-very-constraining contexts (e.g., "John saw the bat that he found in the forest"). These sentences were part of a longer story. What the participant had to do was pick out a relevant picture (of four on the computer screen) for part of the story. The trick was that one of the pictures was related to the other meaning of the homophone (e.g., a baseball glove, which is related to a baseball bat). Due to priming, if people are thinking about that other meaning of the homophone (baseball bat), they are likely to spend some of their time looking at the picture related to that meaning (the baseball glove). If they have successfully determined that the homophone "bat" refers to the animal bat, they should ignore the glove picture. Which is exactly what happened. For both typically developing 6-9 year-olds and 6-9 year-olds with Autism. This is a problem for the weak central coherence theory.

Autism and prosody

In the same session, the Snedeker Lab presented work on prosody and Autism. This study, described by Becky Nappa, looked at contrast stress. Consider the following:

(1) "Look at the blue house. Now, look at the GREEN..."

What do you expect to come next? If you are like most people, you think that the next word is "house". Emphasizing "green" suggests that the contrast between the two sentences is the color, not the type of object to be looked at. Instead, if the color word was not stressed:

(2) "Look at the blue house. Now, look at the green..."

You don't know what is coming up, but it's probably not a house.

Atypical prosody is a diagnostic of Autism, at least according to some diagnostic criteria. That is, people with Autism often use prosody in unusual ways. But many of these folk have, as I pointed out above, general language difficulties. What about the language-intact Autism population? Here, the data has been less clear. There is still some unusual production of prosody, but that doesn't mean that they don't understand prosody.

Nappa and Snedeker tested children's understanding of contrastive stress. While typically-developing children performed as expected (interpreting contrastive stress as meaning a new example of the same type of object will be described), highly verbal children with Autism performed exactly opposite: they expected a new type of object for (1) and the same type of object for (2).

A second study looking at given/new stress patterns. Compare:

(3) Put the candle on the table. Now put the candle on the counter.
(4) Put the candle on the table. Now put the CANdy on the counter.

In general, if you are going to re-mention the same object ("candle" in (3)), you don't stress it the second time around. When you are mentioning a new object -- especially if its name sounds similar to something you have already described -- you are likely to stress it. Here, interestingly, the ASD children were just as good as typically-developing children.

Nappa puts these two findings together and suggest that children with Autism have overgeneralized the stress pattern in (3-4) to cases like (1-2). In general, they think stressed words refer to something new.

Other Day 3 talks

There were other good talks on Day 3, but by my notes always get more and more sparse as a conference goes on. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University (the speaker was Kristen Johannes) argued that "differences between child and adult spatial language have been previously attributed to underdeveloped conceptual representations" (this is a quote from the abstract). In particular, children use the preposition "on" in strange ways. They argue that this is because children have impoverished spatial vocabulary (there are a number of useful words they don't know) and, given that they don't have those words, they over-apply "on" not so much because they conceptualize of "on"ness differently, but because they are, literally, at a loss for words. When you make adults describe spatial arrangements without using the fancy adult words they normally use, they end up over-applying "on" in much the same way kids do. (Here I am working from memory plus the abstract -- my notes, as I mentioned, are incomplete).

Careful readers will notice that I haven't written about Day 2 yet. Stay tuned.

Boston University Conference on Language Development: Day 1

This year marks my 7th straight BUCLD. BUCLD is the major yearly language acquisition conference. (IASCL is the other sizable language acquisition conference, but meets only every three years; it is also somewhat more international than BUCLD and the Empiricist contingent is a bit larger, whereas BUCLD is *relatively* Nativist).

NOTE I'm typing this up during a break at the conference, so I've spent less time making these notes accessible to the general public than usual. Some parts may be opaque to you if you don't know the general subject matter. Feel free to ask questions in the comments.

Day 1 (Friday, Nov. 2)

What does eyetracking tell us about kid's sentence processing

The conference got off to a great start with Jesse Snedeker's 9am talk, "Negation in children's online language comprehension" (for those who don't know, there are 3 talks at any given time; no doubt the other two 9am talks were good, but I wasn't at them). I was actually more interested in the introduction than the conclusion. Over the last 15 years, the Visual World Paradigm has come to dominate how we study children's language processing. Here is how I usually describe the paradigm to participants in my studies: "People typically look at what is being talked about. So if I talk about the window, you'll probably automatically look at the window. So we can measure what people look at as they listen to sentences to get a sense of what they think the sentence is about at any given time."

Snedeker's thesis was that we actually don't know what part of language comprehension this paradigm measures. Does it measure your interpretation of individual words or of the sentence as a whole? One of the things about language is that words have meanings by themselves, but when combined into sentences, new meanings arise that aren't part of any individual word. So "book" is a physical object, but if I say "The author started the book", you likely interpret "book" as something closer to an activity ("writing the book") than a physical object.

Because the Visual World Paradigm is used extensively by sentence-comprehension people (like me), we hope that it measures sentence comprehension, not just individual words. Snedeker walked through many of the classic results from the Visual World Paradigm and argued that they are consistent with the possibility that the Visual World Paradigm just measures word meaning, not sentence meaning.

She then presented a project showing that, at least in some cases, the Visual World Paradigm is sensitive to sentence meaning, which she did by looking at negation. In "John broke the plate", we are talking about a broken plate, where as in "John didn't break the plate", we are not. So negation completely changes the meaning of the sentence. She told participants stories about different objects while the participants looked at pictures of those objects on a computer screen (the screen of an automatic eyetracker, which can tell where the participant is looking). For example, the story might be about a clumsy child who was carrying dishes around and broke some of them but not others (and so, on the screen, there was a picture of a broken plate and a picture of a not-broken plate). She found that adults and even children as young as three years old look at the broken plate when they heard "John broke the plate" but at the not-broken plate when they heard "John didn't break the plate", and they did so very quickly ... which is what you would expect if eyetracking was measuring your current interpretation of the sentence rather than just your current interpretation of the individual words (in which case, when you hear the word "plate", either plate will do).

(This work was joint work with Miseon Lee -- a collaborator of mine -- Tracy Brookhyser and Matthew Jiang.)

The First Mention Effect

W. Quin Yow of Singapore University of Technology and Design presented a project looking at pronoun interpretation (a topic close to my heart). She looked at sentences in which adults typically interpret the pronoun as referring to the previous subject (these are not the so-called "implicit causality" sentences I discuss most on this blog):

Miss Owl is going out with Miss Ducky. She wants her bag. 

She found, as usual, a strong preference for "she" to refer to Miss Owl in this (and similar) sentences. There is one older study that did not find such a preference in children roughly 4-6 years old, but several other studies have found evidence of (weak) first-mention effects in such sentences, including [shameless self-plug] work I presented at BUCLD two years ago.

Yow compared monolingual English-speaking four year-olds and bilingual English-speaking four year-olds (their "other" language differed from kid to kid). While only the bilinguals showed a statistically significant first-mention effect, the monolingual kids were only just barely not above chance and almost identical to the monolinguals. While the first-mention effects she saw were weaker than what I saw in my own work, her kids were slightly younger (four year-olds instead of five year-olds).

The additional twist she added was that, in some conditions, the experimenter pointed to one of the characters in the story at the moment she uttered the pronoun. This had a strong effect on how adults and bilingual children interpreted the pronoun; the effect was weaker or monolingual children, but I couldn't tell whether it was significantly weaker (with only 16 kids per group, a certain amount of variability between groups is expected).

In general, I interpret this as more evidence that young children do have (weak) first-mention biases. And it is nice to have one's results replicated.

Iconicity in sign language

Rachel Magid, a student of Jennie Pyers at Wellesley College, presented work on children's acquisition of sign language. Some signs are "iconic" in that they resemble the thing being referred to: for instance, miming swinging a hammer as the sign for "hammer" (I remember this example from the talk, but I do not remember whether that's an actual sign in ASL or any other sign language). Spoken languages have iconic words as well, such as "bark", which both means and sort of sounds like the sound a dog makes. This brings up an important point: iconic words/signs resemble the things they refer to, but not perfectly, and in fact it is often difficult to guess what they refer to, though once it has been explained to you, the relationship is obvious.

The big result was that four year-olds hearing children found it easier to learn iconic than non-iconic signs, whereas three year-olds did not. Similar results were found for deaf children (though if memory serves, the three year-old deaf children were trending towards doing better with iconic signs, though the number of subjects -- 9 deaf three year-olds -- was too small to say much about it).

Why care? There are those who think that early sign language acquisition -- and presumably the creation of sign languages themselves -- derives from imitation and mimicry (basically, sign languages and sign language acquisition start as a game of charades). If so, then you would expect those signs that are most related to imitation/mimicry to be the easiest to learn. However, the youngest children -- even deaf children who have learned a fair amount of sign language -- don't find them especially easy to learn. Why older children and adults *do* find them easier to learn still requires an explanation, though .

[Note: This is my interpretation of the work. Whether Magid and Pyers would endorse the last paragraph, I am not sure.]

Briefly-mentioned

Daniele Panizza (another occasional collaborator of mine) presented work done with a number of folks, including Stephen Crain, on 3-5 year-olds' interpretations of numbers. The question is whether young children understand reversals of entailment scales. So, if you say "John has two butterflies", that means that you do not have three, whereas saying "If John has two butterflies, give him a sticker" means that if he has two OR MORE butterflies, give him a sticker [NOTE, even adults find this "at least two" reading to be a bit iffy; the phenomenon is that they find the "at least two" reading much better in a downward-entailing context like a conditional MUCH BETTER than in a normal declarative]. Interestingly, another colleague and I had spent a good part of the last week wondering whether children that age understood this, so we were happy to learn the answer so quickly: they do.

In the next talk, Einat Shetreet presented work with Julia Reading, Nadine Gaab and Gennaro Chierchia also looking at entailment scales, but with scalar quantifiers rather than numerals. Adults generally think "John ate some of the cookies" means that he did not eat all of them (some = some but not all), whereas "John didn't eat all of the cookies" means that he ate some of them (not all = some). They found that six year olds also get both of these inferences, which is consistent with the just-mentioned Panizza study.

These studies may seem esoteric but get at recent theories of scalar implicature. Basically, theories of scalar implicature have been getting much more complex recently, suggesting that this relatively simple phenomenon involves many moving pieces. Interestingly, children are very bad at scalar implicature (even up through the early elementary years, children are much less likely to treat "some" as meaning "some but not all", so they'll accept sentences like "Some elephants have trunks" as reasonable sentences, whereas adults tend to find such sentences quite odd). So the race is on to figure out which of the many component parts of scalar implicature are the limiting step in early language acquisition.

There were many other good talks on the first day; these merely represent those for which I have the most extensive notes. 

Learning What Not to Say

A troubling fact about language is that words can be used in more than one way. For instance, I can throw a ball, I can throw a party, and I can throw a party that is also a ball.

These cats are having a ball.

The Causative Alternation

Sometimes the relationship between different uses of a word is completely arbitrary. If there's any relationship between the different meanings of ball, most people don't know it. But sometimes there are straightforward, predictable relationships. For instance, consider:

John broke the vase.
The vase broke.

Mary rolled the ball.
The ball rolled.

This is the famous causative alternation. Some verbs can be used with only a subject (The vase broke. The ball rolled) or with a subject and an object (John broke the vase. Mary rolled the ball). The relationship is highly systematic. When there is both a subject and an object, the subject has done something that changed the object. When there is only a subject, it is the subject that undergoes the change. Not all verbs work this way:

Sally ate some soup.
Some soup ate.

Notice that Some soup ate doesn't mean that some soup was eaten, but rather has to mean nonsensically that it was the soup doing the eating. Some verbs simply have no meaning at all without an object:

Bill threw the ball.
*The ball threw.

In this case, The ball threw doesn't appear to mean anything, nonsensical or otherwise (signified by the *). Try:

*John laughed Bill.
Bill laughed.

Here, laughed can only appear with a subject and no object.

The dative alternation

Another famous alternation is the dative alternation:

John gave a book to Mary.
John gave Mary a book.

Mary rolled the ball to John.
Mary rolled John the ball.

Once again, not all verbs allow this alternation:

John donated a book to the library.
*John donated the library a book.

(Some people actually think John donated the library a book sounds OK. That's all right. There is dialectical variation. But for everyone there are verbs that won't alternate.)

The developmental problem


These alternations present a problem for theory: how do children learn which verbs can be used in which forms? A kid who learns that all verbs that appear with both subjects and objects can appear with only subjects is going to sound funny. But so is the kid who thinks verbs can only take one form.

The trick is learning what not to say

One naive theory is that kids are very conservative. They only use verbs in constructions that they've heard. So until they hear "The vase broke," they don't think that break can appear in that construction. The problem with this theory is that lots of verbs are so rare that it's possible that (a) the verb can be used in both constructions, but (b) you'll never hear it used in both.

Another possibility is that kids are wildly optimistic about verb alternations and assume any verb can appear in any form unless told otherwise. There are two problems with this. The first is that kids are rarely corrected when they say something wrong. But perhaps you could just assume that, after a certain amount of time, if you haven't heard e.g. The ball threw then threw can't be used without an object. The problem with that is, again, that some verbs are so rare that you'll only hear them a few times in your life. By the time you've heard that verb enough to know for sure it doesn't appear in a particular construction, you'll be dead.

The verb class hypothesis

In the late 1980s, building on previous work, Steven Pinker suggested a solution to this problem. Essentially, there are certain types of verbs which, in theory, could participate in a given alternation. Verbs involving caused changes (break, eat, laugh) in theory can participate in the causative alternation, and verbs involving transfer of possession (roll, donate) in theory can participate in the dative alternation, and this knowledge is probably innate. What a child has to learn is which verbs do participate in the dative alternation.

For reasons described above, this can't be done one verb at a time. And this is where the exciting part of the theory comes in. Pinker (building very heavily on work by Ray Jackendoff and others) argues that verbs have core aspects of their meaning and some extra stuff. For instance, break, crack, crash, rend, shatter, smash, splinter and tear all describe something being caused to fall to pieces. What varies between the verbs is the exact manner in which this happens. Jackendoff and others argues that the shared meaning is what is important to grammar, whereas the manner of falling to pieces was extra information which, while important, is not grammatically central.

Pinker's hypothesis was that verb alternations make use of this core meaning, not the "extra" meaning. From the perspective of the alternation, then, break, crack, crash, rend, shatter, smash, splinter and tear are all the same verb. So children are not learning whether break alternates, they learn whether the whole class of verbs alternate. Since there are many fewer classes than than there are verbs (my favorite compendium VerbNet has only about 270), the fact that some verbs are very rare isn't that important. If you know what class it belongs to, as long as the class itself is common enough, you're golden.

Testing the theory


This particular theory has not been tested as much as one might expect, partly because it is hard to test. It is rather trivial to show that verbs do or don't participate in alternations as a class, partly because that's how verb classes are often defined (that's how VerbNet does it). Moreover, various folks (like Stefanowitsch, 2008) argue that although speakers might notice the verb classes, that doesn't prove that people actually do use those verb classes to learn which verbs alternate and which do not.

The best test, then, is it teach people -- particularly young children -- new verbs that either belong to a class that does alternate or to a class that does not and see if they think those new verbs should or should not alternate. Very few such studies have been done.

Around the same time Pinker's seminal Language and Cognition came out in 1989, which outlines the theory I described above, a research team led by his student Jess Gropen (Gropen, Pinker, Hollander, Golberg and Wilson, 1989) published a study of the dative alternation. They taught children new verbs of transfer (such as "moop," which meant to move an object to someone using a scoop), which in theory could undergo the dative alternation. The question they asked was whether kids would be more likely to use those verbs in the alternation if the verbs were monosyllabic (moop) or bisyllabic (orgulate). They were more likely to do so for the monosyllabic verbs, and in fact in English monosyllabic verbs are more likely to alternate. This issue of how many syllables the verb has did come up in Language and Cognition, but it wasn't -- at least to me -- the most compelling part of the story (which is why I left it out of the discussion so far!).

Ambridge, Pine and Rowland (2011)


Ben Ambridge, Julian Pine and Caroline Rowland of the University of Liverpool have a new study in press which is the only study to have directly tested whether verb meaning really does guide which constructions a child thinks a given verb can be used in, at least to the best of my knowledge -- and apparently to theirs, since they don't cite anyone else. (I've since learned that Brooks and Tomasello, 1999, might be relevant, but the details are sufficiently complicated and the paper sufficiently long that I'm not yet sure.)

They taught children two novel verbs, one of which should belong to a verb class that participates in the causative alternation (a manner of motion verb: bounce, move, twist, rotate, float) and one of which should not (an emotional expression: smile, laugh, giggle). Just to prove to you that these classes exist, compare:

John bounced/moved/twisted/rotated/floated the ball.

The ball bounced/moved/twisted/rotated/floated.

*John smiled/laughed/giggled Sally.
Sally smiled/laughed/giggled.

Two groups of children (5-6 years old and 9-10 years old) were taught both types of verbs with subjects only. After a lot of training, they were shown new sentences with the verbs and asked to rate how good the sentences were. In the case of the manner of motion verb, they liked the sentences whether the verb had an subject and an object or if the verb had only a subject. That is, they thought the verb participated in the causative alternation. For the emotion expression verb, however, they thought it sounded good with a subject only; when it had both a subject and an object, they thought it did not sound good. This was true both for the older kids and the younger kids.

This is, I think, a pretty nice confirmation of Pinker's theory. Interestingly, Ambridge and colleagues think that Pinker is nonetheless wrong, but based on other considerations. Partly, our difference of opinion comes from the fact that we interpret Pinker's theory differently. I think I'm right, but that's a topic for another post. Also, there is some disagreement about a related phenomenon (entrenchment), but that, too, is a long post, and the present post is long enough.


____
Gropen, J., Pinker, S., Hollander, M., Goldberg, R., and Wilson, R. (1989). The Learnability and Acquisition of the Dative Alternation in English Language, 65 (2) DOI: 10.2307/415332


Ben Ambridge, Julian M. Pine, and Caroline F. Rowland (2011). Children use verb semantics to retreat from overgeneralization errors Cognitive Linguistics


For picture credits, look here and here.

Learning the passive

If Microsoft Word had its way, passive verbs would be excised from the language. That would solve children some problems, because passive verbs are more difficult to learn than one might think, because not all verbs passivize. Consider:

*The bicycle was resembled by John.
*Three bicycles are had by John.
*Many people are escaped by the argument.

The bicycle was resembled by John: A how-to guide.

So children must learn which verbs have passives and which don't. I recently sat down to read Pinker, Lebeaux and Frost (1987), a landmark study of how children learn to passivize verbs. This is not a work undertaken lightly. At 73 pages, Pinker et al. (1987) is not Steve Pinker's longest paper -- that honor goes to his 120-page take-down of Connectionist theories of language, Pinker and Prince (1988) -- but it is long, even for psycholinguistics. It's worth the read, both for the data and because it lays out the core of what become Learnability and Cognition, one of the books that has had the most influence on my own work and thinking.

The Data


The authors were primarily interested in testing the following claim: that children are conservative learners and only passivize verbs that they have previously heard in the passive. This would prevent them from over-generating passives that don't exist in the adult language.

First, the authors looked at a database of transcriptions of child speech. A large percentage of the passive verbs they found were passives the children couldn't possibly have heard before because they aren't legal passives in the adult language:

It's broked? (i.e., is it broken?)
When I get hurts, I put dose one of does bandage on.
He all tieded up, Mommy.

Of course, when we say that the child couldn't have heard such passives before, you can't really be sure what the child heard. It just seems unlikely. To more carefully control what the child had heard, the authors taught children of various ages (the youngest group was 4 years old) made-up verbs. For instance, they might demonstrate a stuffed frog jumping on top of a stuffed elephant and say, "Look, the frog gorped the elephant." Then they would show the elephant jumping on top of a mouse and ask the child, "What happened to the mouse?"

If you think "gorp" has a passive form, the natural thing to do would be to say "The mouse was gorped by the elephant." But a child who only uses passive verbs she has heard before would refuse to utter such a sentence. However, across a range of different made-up verbs and across four different experiments, the authors found that children were willing -- at least some of the time -- to produce these new passive verbs. (In addition to production tests, there were also comprehension tests where the children had to interpret a passivization of an already-learned verb.)

Some Considerations

These data conclusively proved that children are not completely conservative, at least not by 4 years of age (there has been a lot of debate more recently about younger children). With what we know now, we know that the conservative child theory had to be wrong -- again, at least for 4 yos -- but it's worth remembering that at the time, this was a serious hypothesis.

There is a lot of other data in the paper. Children are more likely to produce new passive forms as they get older (higher rates for 5 year-olds than 4 year-olds). They taught children verbs where the agent is the object and the patient is the subject (that is, where The frog gorped the elephant means "the elephant jumped on top of the frog"). Children had more difficulty passivizing those verbs. However, a lot of these additional analyses are difficult to interpret because of the small sample sizes (16 children and only a handful of verbs per experiment or sub-experiment).

Theory 

Fair warning: the rest of this post is pretty technical.

What excites me about this paper is the theoretical work. For instance, the authors propose a theory of linking rules that have strong innate constraints and yet still some language-by-language variation.

The linkages between individual thematic roles in thematic cores and individual grammatical functions in predicate-argument structures is in turn mediated by a set of unmarked universal linking rules: agents are mapped onto subjects; patients are mapped onto objects; locations and paths are mapped onto oblique objects. Themes are mapped onto any unique grammatical function but can be expressed as oblique, object or subject; specifically, as the 'highest' function on that list that has not already been claimed by some other argument of the verb.

With respect to passivization, what is important is that only verbs which have agents as subjects are going to be easily passivized. The trick is that what counts as an 'agent' can vary from language to language.

It is common for languages to restrict passivized subjects to patients affect by an action ... The English verbal passive, of course, is far more permissive; most classes of transitive verbs, even those that do not involve physical actions, have the privilege of passivizability assigned to them. We suggest this latitude is possible because what counts as the patient of an action is not self-evident ... Languages have the option of defining classes in which thematic labels are assigned to arguments whose roles abstractly resemble those of physical thematic relations...

This last passage sets up the core of the theory to be developed in Learnability and Cognition. Children are born knowing that certain canonical verbs -- ones that very clearly have agents and patients, like break -- must passivize, and that a much larger group of verbs in theory might passivize, because they could be conceived of as metaphorically having agents and patients. What they have to learn is which verbs from that broader set actually do passivize. Importantly, verbs come in classes of verbs with similar meanings. If any verb from that set passivizes, they all will.

This last prediction is the one I am particularly interested in. A later paper (Gropen, Pinker, Hollander, Goldberg & Wilson, 1989) explored this hypothesis with regards to the dative alternation, but I don't know of much other work. In general, Learnability and Cognition go less attention than it should have, perhaps because by the time it was published, the Great Past Tense Debate had already begun. I've often thought of continuing this work, but teaching novel verbs to children in the course of an experiment is damn hard. Ben Ambridge has recently run a number of great studies on the acquisition of verb alternations (like the passive), so perhaps he will eventually tackle this hypothesis directly.

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Pinker S, Lebeaux DS, and Frost LA (1987). Productivity and constraints in the acquisition of the passive. Cognition, 26 (3), 195-267 PMID: 3677572

Boston University Conference on Language Development: Day 1

BUCLD is one of my favorite conferences, not least of which because it takes place every year just across the river. This year has been shaping up to be a particularly good year, if the first day is any indication.

Ben Ambridge (w/Julien Pine & Caroline Rowland) gave an excellent talk on learning semantic restrictions on verb alternations. Of all the work Steve Pinker has done, I think his verb alternation work is the least well-known, but it's also probably my favorite work, and it's nice to see someone systematically revisiting these issues, and I think Ambridge is making some important contributions.

Kenny Smith (w/Elizabeth Wonnacott) presented a really neat proof-of-concept involving language evolution, showing that you can get robust regularization of linguistic systems in a community of speakers even if none of the individual learners/speakers have strong biases to regularize the input. This was a really fun talk; one of those talks that makes one reconsider one's life choices ("should I be studying language evolution?").

Dea Hunsicker (w/Susan Goldin-Meadow) presented new analyses of an old home-sign corpus, looking at evidence that this particular home sign had noun phrases. Home-sign, for those who don't know it, is an ad-hoc mini sign language often developed by deaf children who don't have exposure to a developed sign language.

If I had to pick a best talk, I'd pick Erin Conwell's talk (w/Tim O'Donnell & Jesse Snedeker) on the dative alternation, in which she sketched an explanation of why, although double-object constructions are overall more frequent that prepositional-object constructions, the latter seem to be more productive in early child language. But I may be biased here in that Erin is a post-doc in the same lab as me.

There were a number of other good talks today that I saw -- and many that I didn't -- which deserve mention. I'd write more, but it's late, and there's another full day coming up tomorrow.

Negative Evidence: Still Missing after all these Years

My pen-pal Melodye has posted a thought-provoking piece at Child's Play on negative evidence. As she rightly points out, issues of negative evidence have played a crucial role in the development of theories of language acquisition. But she doesn't think that's a good thing. Rather, it's "ridiculous, [sic] and belies a complete lack of understanding of basic human learning mechanisms."

The argument over negative evidence, as presented by Melodye, is ridiculous, but that seems to stem from (a) conflating two different types of negative evidence, and (b) misunderstanding what the argument was about.

Fig. 1. Melodye notes that rats can learn from negative evidence, so why can't humans? We'll see why.

Here's Melodye's characterization of the negative evidence argument:

[T]he argument is that because children early on make grammatical ‘mistakes’ in their speech (e.g., saying ‘mouses’ instead of ‘mice’ or ‘go-ed’ instead of ‘went’), and because they do not receive much in the way of corrective feedback from their parents (apparently no parent ever says “No, Johnny, for the last time it’s MICE”), it must therefore beimpossible to explain how children ever learn to correct these errors. How — ask the psychologists — could little Johnny ever possibly ‘unlearn’ these mistakes? This supposed puzzle is taken by many in developmental psychology to be one of a suite of arguments that have effectively disproved the idea that language can be learned without an innate grammar.

What's the alternative? Children are predicting what word is going to come up in a sentence.

[I]f the child is expecting ‘mouses’ or ‘gooses,’ her expectations will be violated every time she hears ‘mice’ and ‘geese’ instead.  And clearly that will happen a lot.  Over time, this will so weaken her expectation of ‘mouses’ and ‘gooses,’ that she will stop producing these kinds of words in context.

I can't speak for every Nativist, or for everyone who has studied over-regularization, but since Melodye cites Pinker extensively and specifically, and since I've worked on over-regularization within the Pinkerian tradition, I think I can reasonably speak for at least a variant of Pinkerianism. And I think Melodye actually agrees with us almost 100%.


My understanding of Pinker's Words and Rules account -- and recall that I published work on this theory with one of Pinker's students, so I think my understanding is well-founded -- is that children originally over-regularize the plural of mouse as mouses, but eventually learn that mice is the plural of mouse by hearing mice a lot. That is, our account is almost identical to Melodye's except it doesn't include predictive processing. I actually agree that if children are predicting mouses and hear mice, that should make it easier to correct their mistaken over-regularization. But the essential story is the same.

Where I've usually seen Nativists bring up this particular negative evidence argument (and remember there's another) is in the context of Behaviorism, on which rats (and humans) learned through being explicitly rewarded for doing the right thing and explicitly punished for doing the wrong thing. The fact that children learning language are almost never corrected (as Melodye notes) is evidence against that very particular type of Empiricist theory.

That is, we don't (and to my knowledge, never have) argued that children can only learn the word mice through Universal Grammar. Again, it's possible (likely?) that someone has made that argument. But not us.[1]


Negative Evidence #2


There is a deeper problem with negative evidence that does implicate, if not Universal Grammar, at least generative grammars. That is, as Pinker notes in the article cited by Melodye, children generalize some things and not others. Compare:


(1) John sent the package to Mary.
(2) John sent Mary the package.
(3) John sent the package to the border.
(4) *John sent the border the package.


That * means that (4) is ungrammatical, or at least most people find it ungrammatical. Now, on a word-prediction theory that tracks only surface statistics (the forms of words, not their meaning or syntactic structure), you'd probably have to argue that whenever children have heard discussions of packages being sent to Mary, they've heard either (1) or (2), but in discussions of sending packages to borders, they've only ever heard (3) and never (4). This is surprising, and thus they've learned that (4) is no good. 


The simplest version of this theory won't work, though. Since children (and you) have presumably never heard any of the sentences below (where Gazeindenfrump and Bleizendorf are people's names, the dax is an object, and a dacha is a kind of house used in Russia):


(5) Gazeidenfrump sent the dax to Bleizendorf.
(6) Gazeidenfrump sent Bleizendorf the dax.
(7) Gazeidenfrump sent the dax to the dacha.
(8) *Gazeidenfrump sent the dacha the dax. 


Since we've heard (and expected) sentence #8 just as many times as we heard/expected (5-7), failures of predictions can't explain why we know (8) is bad but (5-7) isn't. (BTW If you don't like my examples, there are many, many more in the literature; these are the best I can think of off the top of my head.)


So we can't be tracking just the words themselves, but something more abstract. Pinker has an extended discussion of this problem in his 1989 book, in which he argues that the constraint is semantic: we know that you can use the double-object construction (e.g., 2, 4, 6 or 8) only if the recipient of the object can actually possess the object (that is, the dax becomes Bleizendorf's, but it doesn't become the dacha's, since dachas -- and borders -- can't own things). I'm working off of memory now, but I think -- but won't swear -- that Pinker's solution also involves some aspects of the syntactic/semantic structures above being innate.


Pinker's account is not perfect and may end up being wrong in some places, but it remains the fact that negative evidence (implicit or not) can't alone explain where children (and adults) do or do not generalize.


-----
Notes: 

[1] Melodye quotes Pinker saying "The implications of the lack of negative evidence for children's overgeneralization are central to any discussion of learning, nativist or empiricist." That is the quote that she says is "quite frankly, ridiculous." Here is the full quote. I'll let you decide whether it's ridiculous:

This nature–nurture dichotomy is also behind MacWhinney’s mistaken claim that the absence of negative evidence in language acquisition can be tied to Chomsky, nativism, or poverty-of-the-stimulus arguments. Chomsky (1965, p. 32) assumed that the child’s input ‘consist[s] of signals classified as sentences and nonsentences _’ – in other words, negative evidence. He also invokes indirect negative evidence (Chomsky, 1981). And he has never appealed to Gold’s theorems to support his claims about the innateness of language. In fact it was a staunch ANTI-nativist, Martin Braine (1971), who first noticed the lack of negative evidence in language acquisition, and another empiricist, Melissa Bowerman (1983, 1988), who repeatedly emphasized it. The implications of the lack of negative evidence for children’s overgeneralization are central to any discussion of learning, nativist or empiricist.

-----
Quotes:
PINKER, S. (2004). Clarifying the logical problem of language acquisition Journal of Child Language, 31 (4), 949-953 DOI: 10.1017/S0305000904006439


photo: Big Fat Rat

When is the logically impossible possible?

Child's Play has posted the latest in a series of provoking posts on language learning. There's much to recommend the post, and it's one of the better defenses of statistical approaches to language learning around on the Net. It would benefit from some corrections, though, and into the gap I humbly step...


The post sets up a classic dichotomy:

Does language “emerge” full-blown in children, guided by a hierarchy of inbuilt grammatical rules for sentence formation and comprehension? Or is language better described as a learned system of conventions — one that is grounded in statistical regularities that give the appearance of a rule-like architecture, but which belie a far more nuanced and intricate structure?

It's probably obvious from the wording which one they favor. It's also less obviously a false dichotomy. There probably was a very strong version of Nativism that at one point looked like their description of Option #1, but very little Nativist theory I've read from the last few decades looks anything like that. Syntactic Bootstrapping and Syntactic Bootstrapping are both much more nuanced (and interesting) theories.


Some Cheek!


Here's where the post gets cheeky: 

For over half a century now, many scientists have believed that the second of these possibilities is a non starter. Why? No one’s quite sure — but it might be because Chomsky told them it was impossible.

Wow? You mean nobody really thought it through? That seems to be what Child's Play thinks, but it's a misrepresentation of history. There are a lot of very good reasons to favor Nativist positions (that is, ones with a great deal of built-in structure). As Child's Play discuss -- to their credit -- any language admits an infinite number of grammatical sentences, so any finite grammar will fail (they treat this as a straw-man argument, but I think historically that was once a serious theory). There are a number of other deep learning problems that face Empiricist theories (Pinker has an excellent paper on the subject from around 1980). There are deep regularities across languages -- such as linking rules -- that are crazy coincidences or reflect innate structure. 


The big one, from my standpoint, is that any reasonable theory of language is going to have to have, in the adult state, a great deal of structure. That is, one wants to know why "John threw the ball AT Sally" means something different from "John threw the ball TO Sally." Or why "John gave Mary the book" and "John gave the book to Mary" mean subtly different things (if you don't see that, try substituting "the border" with "Mary"). A great deal of meaning is tied up in structure, and representing structure as statistical co-occurrences doesn't obviously do the job. 


Unlike Child's Play, I'm not going to discount any possibility of the opposing theories to get the job done (though I'm pretty sure they can't). I'm simply pointing out that Nativism didn't emerge from a sustained period of collective mental alienation.


Logically Inconsistent


Here we get to the real impetus for this response, which is this extremely odd section towards the end:

We only get to this absurdist conclusion because Miller & Chomsky’s argument mistakes philosophical logic for science (which is, of course, exactly what intelligent design does).  So what’s the difference between philosophical logic and science? Here’s the answer, in Einstein’s words, “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”

In context, this means something like "Just because our theories have been shown to be logically impossible doesn't mean they are impossible." I've seen similar arguments before, and all I can say each time is:


Huh?


That is, they clearly understand logic quite differently from me. If something is logically impossible, it is impossible. 2 + 2 = 100 is logically impossible, and no amount of experimenting is going to prove otherwise. The only way a logical proof can be wrong is if (a) your assumptions were wrong, or (b) your reasoning was faulty. For instance, the above math problem is actually correct if the answer is written in base 2. 


In general, one usually runs across this type of argument when there is a logical argument against a researcher's pet theory, and said researcher can't find a flaw with the argument. They simply say, "I'm taking a logic holiday." I'd understand saying, "I'm not sure what the flaw in this argument is, though I'm pretty sure there is one." It wouldn't be convincing (or worth publishing), but I can see that. Simply saying, "I've decided not to believe in logic because I don't like what it's telling me" is quite another thing.