Ph.D. thesis on language acquisition available

[Rutvik Desai]

The readers of this list might be interested in my recently
completed thesis:

Modeling Interaction of Syntax and Semantics in Language Acquisition

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~rudesai/thesis.html

Advisor: Prof. Michael Gasser, Indiana University.

Abstract:

How language is acquired by children is one of the major questions of cognitive
science and is linked intimately to the larger question of how the brain and mind
work. I describe a connectionist model of language comprehension that
shows how some behaviors and strategies in language learning can emerge
from general learning mechanisms. A connectionist network attempts to
produce the meanings of input sentences, generated by a small English-like
grammar. I study three interesting behaviors, related to the interaction
of syntax and semantics, that emerge as the network attempts to perform
the task.

First, the network can use syntactic cues to predict aspects of the
meaning of a novel word (syntactic bootstrapping), and its learning of new
syntax is aided by the knowledge of word meanings (semantic
bootstrapping). Secondly, when a familiar verb is encountered in an
incorrect syntactic context, the network tends to follow context to arrive
at an interpretation of the utterance in the early stages of training, and
follows the verb in later stages. Similar behavior is observed in children,
known as frame and verb compliance. Lastly, there is considerable evidence
that children's early language is item-based, i.e., organized around
specific linguistic expressions and items they hear. The network's
representations are also found to be highly item-based and
context-specific in early stages, and become categorical in later stages of
learning, similar to those of adults.

The connectionist simulations provide a concrete and parsimonious account
of these three phenomena in language development. They also support the
idea that domain-specific  behaviors and learning strategies can emerge from
relatively general mechanisms and constraints, and it is not always
necessary to propose apparatus specifically designed for particular tasks.


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Rutvik Desai
Postdoctoral Fellow
Language Imaging Laboratory
Medical College of Wisconsin
http://www.neuro.mcw.edu/