Initial Incidental Acquisition of Word Order Regularities: Is It Just Sequence Learning?  

Oleh:

Williams, John N.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Learning: A Journal of Research in Language Studies (Full Text) vol. 60 no. Sup s2 (2010), page 221–244.
Fulltext: 60_Sup.02_Williams.pdf (239.52KB)

Isi artikel

There is a long tradition of implicit learning research looking at learning of artificial grammars (finite-state grammars that generate meaningless letter strings). Are the associative learning processes evident in these studies at work in learning word order in natural language? To what extent do meaning and prior linguistic knowledge need to be taken into account in the natural language case? In the study reported here, incidental learning of natural language word order is compared directly to a meaningless analogue (in which the same sequential regularities underlie meaningless syllable strings). The results of both experiments are compared to connectionist (simple recurrent network) simulations. The comparisons suggest that similar associative sequence learning mechanisms underlie learning of both the natural language and its meaningless analogue (with the result that there are certain limitations to what is learned). However, to achieve this alignment, it is necessary to take into account the linguistic categories and meaning structure that the participants are likely to impose on the natural language. It is concluded that the initial incidental learning of word order can be explained in terms of associative (sequence) learning and that linguistic knowledge is engaged to the extent that it defines the categories over which statistics are computed.

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