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In Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of the
Cognitive Science Society, p. 113-118. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
Recursive Inconsistencies Are Hard to Learn:
A Connectionist Perspective on Universal Word Order Correlations
Morten H. Christiansen and Joseph T. Devlin
Abstract
Across the languages of the
world there is a high degree of consistency with respect to the
ordering of heads of phrases. Within the generative approach to
language these correlational universals have been taken to support the
idea of innate linguistic constraints on word order. In contrast, we
suggest that the tendency towards word order consistency may emerge
from non-linguistic constraints on the learning of highly
structured temporal sequences, of which human languages are prime
examples. First, an analysis of recursive consistency within
phrase-structure rules is provided, showing how inconsistency may
impede learning. Results are then presented from connectionist
simulations involving simple recurrent networks without linguistic
biases, demonstrating that recursive inconsistencies directly affect
the learnability of a language. Finally, typological language data are
presented, suggesting that the word order patterns which are
infrequent among the world's languages are the ones which are
recursively inconsistent as well as being the patterns which are hard
for the nets to learn. We therefore conclude that innate linguistic
knowledge may not be necessary to explain word order universals.
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