Integrating conceptual and structural cues:
Theories for syntactic acquisition
SynLinks Workshop
University of Connecticut, Storrs
September 17, 2016
Lisa Pearl
The process of syntactic acquisition draws on a variety of information sources, including conceptual and structural cues. In this talk, I investigate what’s been called the Linking Problem, which concerns determining where event participants appear syntactically. I evaluate existing theories that synthesize conceptual and structural cues in different ways by embedding them in a computational model of the acquisition process and seeing if acquisition then proceeds the way we observe in children. This computational evaluation involves specifying several aspects of acquisition concretely, including (i) what children know already, (ii) what data children are learning from, and (iii) what children seem to learn when. I discuss current findings about the theoretical proposals that are best able to match children’s acquisition behavior.
