Recursive Inconsistencies Are Hard to Learn: A Connectionist Perspective on Universal Word Order Correlations (1997) [18 citations — 3 self]
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author = {Morten H. Christiansen and Joseph T. Devlin},
title = {Recursive Inconsistencies Are Hard to Learn: A Connectionist Perspective on Universal Word Order Correlations},
booktitle = {In M. Shafto and P. Langley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th Annual Cognitive Science Society Conference},
year = {1997},
pages = {113--118},
publisher = {Erlbaum}
}
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Abstract:
Across the languages of the world there is a high degree of consistency with respect to the ordering of heads of phrases. Within the generative approach to language these correlational universals have been taken to support the idea of innate linguistic constraints on word order. In contrast, we suggest that the tendency towards word order consistency may emerge from non-linguistic constraints on the learning of highly structured temporal sequences,of which humanlanguagesare prime examples. First, an analysis of recursive consistency within phrase-structure rules is provided, showing how inconsistency may impede learning. Results are then presented from connectionist simulations involving simple recurrent networks without linguistic biases, demonstrating that recursive inconsistencies directly affect the learnability of a language. Finally, typological language data are presented, suggesting that the word order patterns which are infrequent among the world's languages are the ones which...
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