The semantics-syntax interface: Learning grammatical categories and hierarchical syntactic structure through semantics.

Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition, vol. 47, pp. 1141–1155

Abstract

Language is infinitely productive because syntax defines dependencies between grammatical categories of words and constituents, so there is interchangeability of these words and constituents within syntactic structures. Previous laboratory-based studies of language learning have shown that complex language structures like hierarchical center embeddings (HCE) are very hard to learn, but these studies tend to simplify the language learning task, omitting semantics and focusing either on learning dependencies between individual words or on acquiring the category membership of those words. We tested whether categories of words and dependencies between these categories and between constituents, could be learned simultaneously in an artificial language with HCE's, when accompanied by scenes illustrating the sentence's intended meaning. Across four experiments, we showed that participants were able to learn the HCE language varying words across categories and category-dependencies, and constituents across constituents-dependencies. They also were able to generalize the learned structure to novel sentences and novel scenes that they had not previously experienced. This simultaneous learning resulting in a productive complex language system, may be a consequence of grounding complex syntax acquisition in semantics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Authors 4

1. Fenna H. Poletiek corresponding Aachen Department of Cognitive Psychology Institute of Psychology, Leiden University

   Leiden University · Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Cognitive Psychology

   Department of Cognitive Psychology, Institute of Psychology, Leiden University

   Department of Neurobiology of Language, Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics

2. Padraic Monaghan

   Lancaster University · University of Amsterdam

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Linguistics

   Department of Linguistics, University of Amsterdam

   Department of Psychology, Lancaster University

3. Maartje Van de Velde Aachen Department of Cognitive Psychology Institute of Psychology, Leiden University

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Cognitive Psychology

   Department of Cognitive Psychology, Institute of Psychology, Leiden University

4. Bruno R. Bocanegra

   Erasmus University Rotterdam

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Psychology, Education and Child Studies

   Department of Psychology, Education and Child Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam