ERIC Number: EJ1485852
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024-Jan
Pages: 36
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
EISSN: EISSN-1469-7602
Available Date: 0000-00-00
Context-Dependent Learning of Linguistic Disjunction
Masoud Jasbi1; Akshay Jaggi2; Eve V. Clark3; Michael C. Frank3
Journal of Child Language, v51 n1 p1-36 2024
What are the constraints, cues, and mechanisms that help learners create successful word-meaning mappings? This study takes up linguistic disjunction and looks at cues and mechanisms that can help children learn the meaning of "or." We first used a large corpus of parent-child interactions to collect statistics on "or" uses. Children started producing "or" between 18-30 months and by 42 months, their rate of production reached a plateau. Second, we annotated for the interpretation of disjunction in child-directed speech. Parents used "or" mostly as exclusive disjunction, typically accompanied by rise-fall intonation and logically inconsistent disjuncts. But when these two cues were absent, disjunction was generally not exclusive. Our computational modeling suggests that an ideal learner could successfully interpret an English disjunction (as exclusive or not) by mapping forms to meanings after partitioning the input according to the intonational and logical cues available in child-directed speech.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: 1University of California, Davis; 2Harvard Medical School; 3Stanford University

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