Abstract

Modeling Substitution Errors in Spanish Morphology Learning

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Abstract

In early stages of language acquisition, children often make inflectional errors on regular verbs, e.g., Spanish-speaking children produce –a (present-tense 3rd person singular) when other inflections are expected. Most previous models of morphology learning have focused on later stages of learning relating to production
of irregular verbs. We propose a computational model of Spanish inflection learning to examine the earlier stages of learning and present a novel data set of gold-standard inflectional annotations for Spanish verbs. Our model replicates
data from Spanish-learning children, capturing the acquisition order of different inflections and correctly predicting the substitution errors they make. Analyses show that the learning trajectory can be explained as a result of the gradual
acquisition of inflection-meaning associations. Ours is the first computational model to provide an explanation for this acquisition trajectory in Spanish, and represents a theoretical advance more generally in explaining substitution errors in early morphology learning.

Keywords: Morphology acquisition, Spanish, Computational Modeling

How to Cite:

Barak, L., Fernandez Echeverri, N., Feldman, N. H. & Shafto, P., (2023) “Modeling Substitution Errors in Spanish Morphology Learning”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 6(1), 408-410. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/4574-ed28