Computational Linguistics Commons^™

Linguistic Abstractions In Children’S Very Early Utterances, Qihui Xu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How early do children produce multiword utterances? Do children's early utterances reflect abstract syntactic knowledge or are they the result of data-driven learning? We examine this issue through corpus analysis, computational modeling, and adult simulation experiments. Chapter 1 investigates when children start producing multiword utterances; we use corpora to establish the development of multiword utterances and a probabilistic computational model to account for the quantitative change of early multiword utterances. We find that multiword utterances of different lengths appear early in acquisition and increase together, and the length growth pattern can be viewed as a probabilistic and dynamic process.

Chapter …

Doing Away With Defaults: Motivation For A Gradient Parameter Space, Katherine Howitt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, I propose a reconceptualization of the traditional syntactic parameter space of the principles and parameters framework (Chomsky, 1981). In lieu of binary parameter settings, parameter values exist on a gradient plane where a learner’s knowledge of their language is encoded in their confidence that a particular parametric target value, and thus grammatical construction of an encountered sentence, is likely to be licensed by their target grammar. First, I discuss other learnability models in the classic parameter space which lack either psychological plausibility, theoretical consistency, or some combination of the two. Then, I argue for the Gradient Parameter …