Previous abstract | Contents | Next abstract

Modeling the Effect of Cross-Language Ambiguity on Human Syntax Acquisition

A computational framework is presented which is used to model the process by which human language learners acquire the syntactic component of their native language. The focus is feasibility - is acquisition possible within a reasonable amount of time and/or with a reasonable amount of work? The approach abstracts away from specific linguistic descriptions in order to make a `broad-stroke' prediction of an acquisition model's behavior by formalizing factors that contribute to cross-linguistic ambiguity. Discussion centers around an application to Fodor's Structural Trigger's Learner (STL) (1998) and concludes with the proposal that successful computational modeling requires a parallel psycholinguistic investigation of the distribution of ambiguity across the domain of human languages.


William Gregory Sakas, Modeling the Effect of Cross-Language Ambiguity on Human Syntax Acquisition. In: Proceedings of CoNLL-2000 and LLL-2000, Lisbon, Portugal, 2000. [ps] [pdf] [bibtex]
Last update: June 27, 2001. erikt@uia.ua.ac.be