Distributional Language Learning: Mechanisms and Models of Category Formation

Richard Ν. Aslin · Elissa L. Newport

63 citations0/0 files storedLanguage Learning

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Language Development and Disorders Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation Categorization, perception, and language

Abstract

In the past 15 years, a substantial body of evidence has confirmed that a powerful distributional learning mechanism is present in infants, children, adults and (at least to some degree) in nonhuman animals as well. The present article briefly reviews this literature and then examines some of the fundamental questions that must be addressed for any distributional learning mechanism to operate effectively within the linguistic domain. In particular, how does a naive learner determine the number of categories that are present in a corpus of linguistic input and what distributional cues enable the learner to assign individual lexical items to those categories? Contrary to the hypothesis that distributional learning and category (or rule) learning are separate mechanisms, the present article argues that these two seemingly different processes---acquiring specific structure from linguistic input and generalizing beyond that input to novel exemplars---actually represent a single mechanism. Evidence in support of this single-mechanism hypothesis comes from a series of artificial grammar-learning studies that not only demonstrate that adults can learn grammatical categories from distributional information alone, but that the specific patterning of distributional information among attested utterances in the learning corpus enables adults to generalize to novel utterances or to restrict generalization when unattested utterances are consistently absent from the learning corpus. Finally, a computational model of distributional learning that accounts for the presence or absence of generalization is reviewed and the implications of this model for linguistic-category learning are summarized.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 63 citations exist upstream.

References

1957Syntactic Structures 1957Verbal behavior.1996Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants 1997Manuscript Preparation 1959Verbal behavior. By B. F. Skinner. (The Century Psychology Series.) Pp. viii, 478. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1957.1971Speech Perception in Infants 1999Statistical learning of tone sequences by human infants and adults 1999Rule Learning by Seven-Month-Old Infants

Cited by

2016Aging and the statistical learning of grammatical form classes.2022One model for the learning of language 2018The Role of Statistical Learning in Understanding and Treating Spoken Language Outcomes in Deaf Children With Cochlear Implants 2021Cognitive and metacognitive, motivational, and resource considerations for learning new skills across the lifespan 2018The Promise—and Challenge—of Statistical Learning for Elucidating Atypical Language Development 2019Information Integration in Modulation of Pragmatic Inferences During Online Language Comprehension

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.