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Human simulations of vocabulary learning

Human simulations of vocabulary learning. Gillette, Gleitman, Gleitman, Lederer. Présentation Interface Syntaxe-Psycholinguistique Y-Lan BOUREAU. Outline. Some background The problem to be solved Facts : nouns’ acquisition precedes verbs’ acquisition Existing theory

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Human simulations of vocabulary learning

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  1. Human simulations of vocabulary learning Gillette, Gleitman, Gleitman, Lederer Présentation Interface Syntaxe-Psycholinguistique Y-Lan BOUREAU

  2. Outline • Some background • The problem to be solved • Facts : nouns’ acquisition precedes verbs’ acquisition • Existing theory • Gillette et al.’s hypothesis • Simulation experiment • Learning from observation • Learning from linguistic hints • Discussion

  3. The problem of language learning • Children learn language from scratch • Traditional hypothesis : • Children hear adults speak • They spot that « cat » is uttered most frequently when there is a cat around • They infer that « cat » means ‘cat’ • But babies’ vocabulary does not reflect input frequencies • much more nouns than verbs in babies vocabulary

  4. Nouns are learnt earlier • A conceptual hypothesis : • Verbs are conceptually more difficult • So cannot be learnt until babies display adequate conceptual knowledge • Alternative hypothesis : information requirements • Verbs require some syntax to be already acquired (e.g. : I know that Mommy is coming)

  5. Pairing word to world • Three sources of information : • Nonlinguistic evidence (e.g. Mommy says « cat » when the cat is there) • Linguistic evidence : • Co-occurrence of semantically related words in sentences (e.g. food names usually appear with verbs like « eat ») • Syntactic structures in which words occur (e.g. a verb with one subject and two complements is likely to be of the « give » kind)

  6. Hypothesis • Hypothesis : the baby • (1) acquires a small stock of nouns by word-to-world pairing • (2) uses that stock of nouns as a scaffold for constructing representations of the linguistic input that will support a more efficient learning procedure • Support : correlation of changes in vocabulary size with appearance of multiword speech

  7. A simulation experiment • Principle : • Adult learners • (no conceptual issues any more) • Trying to guess : most frequently used nouns or verbs • Observational clues : video clips • Linguistic clues : co-occurring words, syntactic frame

  8. First experiment • Only videoclips • Adults trying to guess 24 nouns and 24 verbs

  9. Results, Part I : Nouns win • Nouns are guessed with much better results than verbs :

  10. Imageability rules • Provided clues are exclusively visual • Nouns of the set (e.g. elephant, plane, bag) are a lot more « imageable » than verbs (e.g. think, know, wait)

  11. Results, part II Nouns Nouns Verbs Verbs

  12. Conclusion of experiment I • The one relevant factor seems to be imageability • Not that surprising : from a video, you learn imageable things ; a thing that is not imageable would be hard to picture !!

  13. Linguistic clues vs. Observational clues • All nouns removed. • 6 conditions : • 1 : videoclips (but with a bip for the verb) • 2 : alphabetical lists of nouns • 3 : 1+2 (videoclips + alphabetical lists) • 4 : syntactic frames with all nonsense words • 5 : sentences with only the verb as nonsense • 6 : 1+5 (videoclips + sentences)

  14. Linguistic clues vs. Observational clues

  15. Linguistic clues vs. Observational clues • 6 conditions : • 1 : videoclips (but with a bip for the verb) • 2 : alphabetical lists of nouns • 3 : 1+2 (videoclips + alphabetical lists) • 4 : syntactic frames with all nonsense words • 5 : sentences with only the verb as nonsense • 6 : 1+5 (videoclips + sentences)

  16. Results Nouns reintroduced No nouns provided !! No more visual information !! Visuals reintroduced

  17. Linguistic clues vs. Observational clues • Remarkably : leap between 3 and 4, whereas the reverse could have been expected ! • Interestingly, those verbs that were best learnt in the observational learnings show a decrease between 3 and 4

  18. Discussion • Verbs : complementary distributions (12 never learnt with visual clues = 12 best learnt with linguistic clues) • This distribution corresponds to the « imageability » criterion : • Quite logically, you can learn visually only what is visually representable • Verbs that use higher level linguistic representations have to wait until those can be constructed

  19. Discussion : general scheme • First, imageable words are learnt on a word-to-world pairing basis • Those imageable words are mostly nouns • That would explain why nouns make up most of young infants’ vocabulary • Second, this first set of words allows learning of new words on a sentence-to-world pairing • Thus conceptual words can be learnt as well

  20. Some reservations • The argument structure is the same across languages (logical requirements), but : • Adults already know the words, so they could try to guess the verbs by exhaustive search with all the information given (e.g. : the best performance is for « look », and it is probably due to the use of « look » with « at » )

  21. The End

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