DDIG: Commitment and Flexibility in the Developing Parser

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

Language learners must identify linguistic properties that differ across languages in the language input that surrounds them, and much recent research has explored the potential importance of distributional regularities in the language input for successful learning. However, other recent findings on child sentence understanding have shown that children's immature language comprehension system is prone to mis-parsing of the input. This raises the possibility that informative distributional information might be missed by the learner: if a child misanalyzes sentences in the input, then the true input distribution from the perspective of adults and researchers may be different from the 'intake', i.e., the effective input distribution that feeds into the language learning mechanism. This project investigates this issue through studies of incremental sentence parsing and reanalysis in question constructions in English and Japanese. Under the direction of Dr. Colin Phillips and Dr. Jeffrey Lidz, Mr. Akira Omaki will conduct studies using eye-tracking, question-after-story and truth value judgment measures in English and Japanese in order to assess a) whether children, like adults, make early commitments to the interpretation of questions ('active dependency processing'), and b) whether children are able to successfully reanalyze in cases where their initial interpretation turns out to be incorrect. The experimental findings will be supplemented with a corpus analysis and a computational modeling study will be combined with the experimental findings, in order to generate an estimate of how the distribution of wh-question constructions appears from a child's perspective. A novel feature of the project is that it combines experimental and corpus-based approaches to gain an understanding of how children's language comprehension system might lead them to apprehend distributional regularities that do not correspond to what is actually present in their input. Thus, one broader impact of the project is that it could have important implications for any research that emphasizes the role of distributional regularities in the language acquisition process. A second broader impact of the project is that it will help to establish new partnerships for language acquisition research on Japanese, based on developing institutional connections with preschools, and will facilitate future international collaborations on comparative language acquisition studies.