2018 Sun Session B 1000
Sunday, November 4, 2018 | Session B, Conference Auditorium | 10am
Conflict resolution between semantic and syntactic cues in language acquisition
M. Beretti, N. Havron, A. Christophe
A central challenge in language acquisition is how to integrate multiple sources of information, potentially in conflict, to acquire new knowledge and adjust existing linguistic representations. One efficient way to accomplish this would be to adapt to the reliability of the context – assign more weight to reliable sources of information. Indeed, in language comprehension, the noisy channel model suggests that the prioritization of one source of information over another is done by taking into account the reliability of each of them in the context (Gibson, Bergen, & Piantadosi, 2013; Yurovsky, Case, & Frank, 2016). Here, we suggest that this process also guides multiple sources integration in language acquisition. We focus on the way 4-5 year-old French-speaking children (n=57) adapt to the reliability of syntactic and semantic sources of information when those are in conflict, and use their adapted predictions to interpret sentences and to, in turn, learn novel words’ meaning.
To test participants’ interpretation, we presented them with spoken sentences which were ambiguous due to a conflict between a semantic and a syntactic cue for meaning. Sentences such as une mange (“an eat”), can either be interpreted as ungrammatical (the speaker actually meant “she eats”), or as introducing a novel word (“an eat” is the name of a novel object – “eatN” is a homophone of the verb “to eat”). Participants were asked to choose, by pointing to a screen, between two videos that illustrate these two options. Thus, they could either rely on syntax and adapt their semantic knowledge (i.e., creating a homophone), or rely on semantics and ignore syntactic information (i.e., choose the picture of a girl eating and assume that the speaker’s use of syntax is strange).
Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions (fig.1): In the induction phase, participants in the syntax-reliable condition were exposed to ‘syntactic interpretations’ (mange is a novel noun, for a novel object, and syntax is reliable), while participants in the semantics-reliable condition were exposed to ‘semantic interpretations’ (une mange means “she eats”, the content words are used reliably, but syntactic expectations are violated). We hypothesized that participants will adapt their expectations to the relative reliability of the two sources of information in the induction phase: At test, when both interpretations are made available, participants should assign more weight to the syntactic source of information when it was always reliable, than when it was not.
As expected, we found that the proportion of syntactic interpretations (trusting syntax and creating a homophone) was higher in the syntax-reliable condition than in the semantics-reliable condition (fig.2). This shows that children can adapt to the current context to integrate multiple sources of information – and moreover, that their acquisition of novel knowledge is affected by their adapted predictions. This demonstrates, for the first time, that children’s adaptation to source reliability is rapid enough to allow learning, and can guide the acquisition of information at different linguistic levels. Children do not only prioritize reliable information in processing, but learn novel words based on these priorities.
References
Gibson, E., Bergen, L., & Piantadosi, S. T. (2013). Rational integration of noisy evidence and prior semantic expectations in sentence interpretation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110(20), 8051–6. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1216438110
Yurovsky, D., Case, S., & Frank, M. C. (2016). Preschoolers Flexibly Adapt to Linguistic Input in a Noisy Channel. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797616668557