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Morris, W. C., Cottrell, G. W., and Elman, J. L. (2000) A connectionist simulation of the empirical acquisition of grammatical relations. In Stefan Wermter and Run Sun, editors, Hybrid Neural Symbolic Integration. Springer Verlag.
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Paper at a Glance 

A Connectionist Simulation of the Empirical Acquisition
of Grammatical Relations
William C. Morris 1 , Garrison W. Cottrell 1 , and Jeffrey Elman 2
1 Computer Science and Engineering Department
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla CA 92093­0114 USA
2 Center for Research in Language
Department of Cognitive Science
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla CA 92093­0114 USA
Abstract. This paper proposes an account of the acquisition of grammatical rela­ tions using the basic concepts of connectionism and a construction­based theory of grammar. Many previous accounts of first­language acquisition assume that grammatical relations (e.g., the grammatical subject and object of a sentence) and linking rules are universal and innate; this is necessary to provide a first set of as­ sumptions in the target language to allow deductive processes to test hypotheses and/or set parameters. In contrast to this approach, we propose that grammatical relations emerge rather late in the language­learning process. Our theoretical proposal is based on two ob­ servations. First, early production of childhood speech is formulaic and becomes systematic in a progressive fashion. Second, grammatical relations themselves are family­resemblance categories that cannot be described by a single parame­ ter. This leads to the notion that grammatical relations are learned in a bottom up fashion. Combining this theoretical position with the notion that the main pur­ pose of language is communication, we demonstrate the emergence of the notion of ``subject'' in a simple recurrent network that learns to map from sentences to se­ mantic roles. We analyze the hidden layer representations of the emergent subject, and demonstrate that these representations correspond to a radially--structured category. We also claim that the pattern of generalization and undergeneraliza­ tion demonstrated by the network conforms to what we expect from the data on children's ...
BibTex
@incollection{morris_aConnectionist,
  author={W. C. Morris and G. W. Cottrell and J. L. Elman},
  title={A connectionist simulation of the empirical acquisition of grammatical relations},
  year={2000},
  editor={Stefan Wermter and Run Sun},
  publisher={Springer Verlag},
  booktitle={Hybrid Neural Symbolic Integration},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/morris_aConnectionist.html}
}

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