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ERIC Number: EJ962979
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2012
Pages: 61
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1048-9223
EISSN: N/A
Disambiguating Syntactic Triggers
Sakas, William Gregory; Fodor, Janet Dean
Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, v19 n2 p83-143 2012
We present data from an artificial language domain that suggest new contributions to the theory of syntactic triggers. Whether a learning algorithm is capable of matching the achievements of child learners depends in part on how much parametric ambiguity there is in the input. For practical reasons this cannot be established for the domain of all natural languages. Our tactic is to estimate the incidence of unambiguous triggers by examining a constructed domain of languages whose syntactic parameters and structural properties are precisely specified. We succeeded in identifying unambiguous triggers for all non-default parameter values in all languages in this domain. In order to do so, we had to invoke between-parameter relations which disambiguate triggers that otherwise would have been parametrically ambiguous. The discovery of unambiguous triggers in this artificial domain does not prove a sufficiency in natural languages, but it may revive investigation of the psychological plausibility of deterministic models of human language acquisition. (Contains 3 figures, 5 tables, and 55 footnotes.)
Psychology Press. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 325 Chestnut Street Suite 800, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Fax: 215-625-2940; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A