Statistical learning of complex questions
Fitz, H.
(2010). Statistical learning of complex questions. In S. Ohlsson, & R. Catrambone (
Eds.),
Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2692-2698). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
The problem of auxiliary fronting in complex polar questions
occupies a prominent position within the nature versus nurture
controversy in language acquisition. We employ a model of
statistical learning which uses sequential and semantic information
to produce utterances from a bag of words. This linear
learner is capable of generating grammatical questions without
exposure to these structures in its training environment. We
also demonstrate that the model performs superior to n-gram
learners on this task. Implications for nativist theories of language
acquisition are discussed.
Publication type
Proceedings paper
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