Learning Islands

[[Classnotes MOC]]

[[Psycholing Classnotes]]

[[Learning Island Constraints, Utku Turk]]

Date:: 2022-02-13

Class:: Psycholinguistics II

Tags:: #umd #classnotes #umd/psylx

• this is one of the many ways that you can think about how people learn islands.
• island stuff is one of the things that people did not even know that they would not be able to do.
  • then we had a lot of questions:
  • are these constraints epiphenomenal
• an interesting paper is Kush et al. from Glossa Psycholinguistics
• Using Computational Models to Test Syntactic Learnability by Wilcox et al.

PS Model

• Do kids only learn from child-directed speech?
  • Colin: we do not have enough information about this difference.
  • Structure wise they are quite similar. lexical wise they are different
  • however, there are some instances when there is no example in child-directed speech while there are some in adult-directed speech.
    • And having one single example will matter a lot, in PS Model
  • having only child-directed model can be thought as a conservative model.
  • Evaluating Meaningful Differences in Leanring and Communication Across SES Backgrounds, by Yi Ting Huang et al.
• Instead of having all sentences, we have container of these sentences.
  • Container is created by following the spine of the structure.
• What if we just give 0 probability to never-occuring stuff?
  • But we have to have an analyzer that could analyze stuff that he never heard of?
  • This model then assumes only positive data.
  • We need to give our learner some space for learning stuff, so the initial parser is very very generous.
• Are the kids even this good at parsing? If children were able to do this parsing, then they could do this.

Learning Problem

• the output of learning is complex
  • examples: that-t, wanna contraction, parastiic gaps, reconstruction etc.
• the output of learning is hard to observe
• cruicial input for learning is hard to observe
  • it is noisy
  • dissimilar from what must be learned
  • rare
• yet learning is robust

not-so-obvious variation

• pronouns:
  • while john was reading the book, he ate an apple.
  • while he was reading the book, john ate an apple.
    • both can be john or somebody else
    • english ok, russian not ok
  • john ate an apple while he was reading the book.
  • he ate an apple while john was reading the book.
    • first one can be both, the second one cannot be john.
    • second one coreference is impossible in all languages
• that trace effect
  • …