International Centre for Language and Communicative Development: How the Input Shapes the Acquisition of Verb Morphology: Elicited Production and Computational Modelling in Two Highly Inflected Languages, 2014-2020

Engelmann, Felix and Granlund, Sonia and Kolak, Joanna and Szreder, Marta and Ambridge, Ben and Pine, Julian and Theakston, Anna and Lieven, Elena (2021). International Centre for Language and Communicative Development: How the Input Shapes the Acquisition of Verb Morphology: Elicited Production and Computational Modelling in Two Highly Inflected Languages, 2014-2020. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-853914

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Data description (abstract)

The aim of the present work was to develop a computational model of how children acquire inflectional morphology for marking person and number; one of the central challenges in language development. First, in order to establish which putative learning phenomena are sufficiently robust to constitute a target for modelling, we ran large-scale elicited production studies with native learners of Finnish (N = 77; 35–63 months) and Polish (N = 81; 35–59 months), using a novel method that, unlike previous studies, allows for elicitation of all six person/number forms in the paradigm (first, second and third person; singular and plural). We then proceeded to build and test a connectionist model of the acquisition of person/number marking which not only acquires near adult-like mastery of the system (including generalisation to unseen items), but also yields all of the key phenomena observed in the elicited-production studies; specifically, effects of token frequency and phonological neighbourhood density of the target form, and a pattern whereby errors generally reflect the replacement of low frequency targets by higher-frequency forms of the same verb, or forms with the same person/number as the target, but with a suffix from an inappropriate conjugation class. The findings demonstrate that acquisition of even highly complex systems of inflectional morphology can be accounted for by a theoretical model that assumes rote storage and phonological analogy, as opposed to formal symbolic rules.

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