Extended Abstract

Immature Representation or Immature Deployment? Modeling Child Pronoun Resolution

Authors
  • Hannah Forsythe (University of California Irvine)
  • Lisa Pearl (University of California, Irvine)

Abstract

Children acquiring Spanish interpret subject pronouns differently from adults, initially relying on pragmatic cues instead of morphosyntactic cues that are more statistically reliable. Following Gagliardi et al. (2017), we use Bayesian cognitive modeling to explore the sources of this non-adult-like behavior, investigating whether it is more likely due to (i) noise in children’s representation of the probability that some cues favor certain antecedents, or (ii) noise in children’s deployment of otherwise adult-like probabilities. Results favor noisy deployment as the source of children’s non-adult-like pronoun resolution.

Keywords: language acquisition, Bayesian models, pronoun resolution, Spanish

How to Cite:

Forsythe, H. & Pearl, L., (2020) “Immature Representation or Immature Deployment? Modeling Child Pronoun Resolution”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 3(1), 488-492. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/748m-k189

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Published on
01 Jan 2020