The semantics-syntax interface: Learning grammatical categories and hierarchical syntactic structure through semantics

Fenna H. Poletiek, Padraic Monaghan, Maartje van de Velde, Bruno R. Bocanegra

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)
119 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Language is infinitely productive because syntax defines dependencies between grammatical categories of words and constituents, so there is interchangeability of these words and constituents within syntactic structures. Previous laboratory-based studies of language learning have shown that complex language structures like hierarchical center embeddings (HCE) are very hard to learn, but these studies tend to simplify the language learning task, omitting semantics and focusing either on learning dependencies between individual words or on acquiring the category membership of those words. We tested whether categories of words and dependencies between these categories and between constituents, could be learned simultaneously in an artificial language with HCE’s, when accompanied by scenes illustrating the sentence’s intended meaning. Across four experiments, we showed that participants were able to learn the HCE language varying words across categories and category-dependencies, and constituents across constituents-dependencies. They also were able to generalize the learned structure to novel sentences and novel scenes that they had not previously experienced. This simultaneous learning resulting in a productive complex language system, may be a consequence of grounding complex syntax acquisition in semantics.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1141-1155
Number of pages15
JournalJournal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition
Volume47
Issue number7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We thank Elise Hopman for very valuable comments on earlier versions of this article. We also thank Roy de Kleijn, Rebecca Frost, and Christine Schoetensack for help with data collection, and Ben Wilson and Chris Petkov for their feedback on the present work. Padraic Monaghan was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (United Kingdom), Grant ES/L008955/1. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Fenna H.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 American Psychological Association

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