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In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the
Cognitive Science Society, 2002. p. 596-601. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
Case, word order, and language learnability: Insights from connectionist modeling.
Gary Lupyan & Morten H. Christiansen
Abstract
How does the existence of case systems, and strict
word order patterns affect the learnability of a given
language? We present a series of connectionist simulations,
suggesting that both case and strict word
order may facilitate syntactic acquisition by a sequential
learning device. Our results are consistent
with typological data concerning the frequencies
with which di erent type of word order patterns
occur across the languages of the world. Our
model also accommodates patterns of syntactic development
across several di erent languages. We
conclude that non-linguistic constraints on general
sequential-learning devices may help explain the relationship
between case, word order, and learnability
of individual languages.
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