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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (11 results)

  • Article
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 40 (2018)
One major class of approaches to explaining the distribu-tion of linguistic forms is rooted in communicative effi-ciency. For theories in which an utterance’s communica-tive efficiency is itself dependent on the distribution oflinguistic forms in the language, however, it is less clearhow to make distributional predictions that escape circu-larity. I propose an approach for these cases that involvesiterating between speaker and listener in the RationalSpeech Act theory. Characteristics of the fixed points ofthis iterative process constitute the distributional predic-tions of the theory. Through computer simulation I applythis approach to the well-studied case of predictability-sensitive optional function word omission for the theoryof Uniform Information Density, and show that the ap-proach strongly predicts the empirically observed nega-tive correlation between phrase onset probability and rateof function word use.
    Cover page: Communicative Efficiency, Uniform Information Density, and the Rational Speech Act theory
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC San Diego Previously Published Works (2013)
      Cover page: Expectation and locality effects in German verb-final structures
      • Article
      Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 40 (2018)
      How does listeners’ perceptual bias influence their interpreta-tion of an ambiguous multiword utterance? We address thisquestion by investigating the relationship between word or-der in a binomial (an expression of type “A and B”) and vi-sual properties of image pairs serving as its potential referents.We found that listeners’ choices were strongly influenced byiconicity and relative salience of images within the pair: par-ticipants preferred referents where the first mentioned imagewas located on the left, as well as pairs where the first im-age was larger than the second image. The effect of image or-der tended to be stronger than the influence of image size, andboth were modulated by participants’ general visual field pref-erences (determined in a separate experimental condition). Wefurther show that binomial phrase interpretation can be simu-lated by a Rational Speech Act model that includes both wordorder effects and utterance-independent preferences of the par-ticipants.
        Cover page: Pragmatic Inference of Intended Referents from Binomial Word Order
        • Article
        • Peer Reviewed
        Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 38 (2016)
        Previous research has found that comprehenders are willingto adopt non-literal interpretations of sentences whose literalreading is unlikely. Several studies found evidence that com-prehenders decide whether or not a given utterance should betaken at face value in accordance with principles of Bayesianrationality, by weighing the prior probability of potential inter-pretations against the degree to which they are (in)consistentwith the literal form of the utterance. While all of these re-sults are consistent with string-edit noise models, many errorprocesses are known to be sensitive to the underlying linguis-tic structure of the intended utterance. Here, we explore thecase of exchange errors and provide experimental evidencethat comprehenders’ noise model is structure-sensitive. Ourresults add further support to the noisy-channel theory of lan-guage comprehension, extend the set of known noise opera-tions to include positional exchanges, and show that compre-henders’ noise models are well-adapted to structure-sensitivesources of signal corruption during communication.
          Cover page: Structure-sensitive Noise Inference: Comprehenders Expect Exchange Errors
          • Thesis
          • Peer Reviewed
          UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2020)

          Ellipsis is a pervasive phenomenon across the world’s languages, and it is easy to see why: it allows speakers to omit certain parts of their utterances while nonetheless conveying their full meaning, which contributes to making linguistic communication highly efficient. There is broad consensus that elliptical utterances depend on the context in some way, but the nature of this dependency remains controversial. Broadly speaking, theories of ellipsis fall into one of two camps that make fundamentally distinct architectural assumptions about the mechanisms that enable ellipsis: IDENTITY theories, which posit that material can be elided only if it is identical to a linguistic antecedent; and referential theories, which assume that ellipsis is enabled by the same underlying mechanism that governs other forms of discourse reference. This thesis draws on evidence from a series of experiments that investigate two prominent types of ellipsis: VP-ellipsis and sluicing. It focuses on cases of mismatch between the elided material and its antecedent in which the meaning of the ellipsis clause is not reducible to the linguistic context and must instead be inferred. Taken together, this investigation makes three main contributions. First, it raises novel challenges for IDENTITY theories by demonstrating that ellipsis can be felicitous even in the face of extreme mismatch. Secondly, it provides new evidence in support of referential theories by showcasing the possibility of inferential ellipsis resolution—a hallmark property of discourse reference. Finally, and most importantly, it contributes new adequacy criteria for linguistic theories aimed at explaining the nature of the linguistic and non-linguistic context and how it interfaces with context-dependent linguistic devices.

            Cover page: Towards a Referential Theory of Ellipsis
            • Article
            • Peer Reviewed
            Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 38 (2016)
            Kehler and Rohde (2013) proposed a Bayesian theory of pro-noun interpretation where the influence of world knowledgeemerges as effects on the prior and the influence of informationstructure as effects on the likelihood: P(referent|pronoun) μP(pronoun|referent)P(referent). Here we present two experi-ments on Mandarin Chinese that allow us to test the generalityof the theory for a language with different syntactic-semanticassociations than English. Manipulations involving two dif-ferent classes of implicit-causality verbs and passive vs. activevoice confirmed key predictions of the Bayesian theory: effectsof these manipulations on the prior and likelihood in produc-tion were consistently reflected in pronoun interpretation pref-erences. Quantitative analysis shows that the Bayesian modelis the best fit for Mandarin compared to two competing anal-yses. These results lend both qualitative and quantitative sup-port to a cross linguistically general Bayesian theory of pro-noun interpretation.
              Cover page: Bayesian Pronoun Interpretation in Mandarin Chinese
              • Article
              • Peer Reviewed
              Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 41 (2019)
              Children exploit regular links between the meanings of wordsand the syntactic structures in which they appear to learn aboutnovel words. This phenomenon, known as syntactic bootstrap-ping, is thought to play a critical role in word learning, espe-cially for words with more opaque meanings such as verbs.We present a computational word learning model which re-produces such syntactic bootstrapping phenomena after expo-sure to a naturalistic word learning dataset, even when undersubstantial memory constraints. The model demonstrates howexperimental syntactic bootstrapping effects constitute rationalbehavior given the nature of natural language input. The modelunifies computational accounts of word learning and syntacticbootstrapping effects observed in the laboratory, and offers apath forward for demonstrating the broad power of the syntax–semantics link in language acquisition.
                Cover page: A rational model of syntactic bootstrapping
                • Article
                • Peer Reviewed
                Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 42 (2020)
                A key challenge in language acquisition is learning morpho-logical transforms relating word roots to derived forms. Tra-ditional unsupervised algorithms find morphological patternsin sequences of phonemes, but struggle to distinguish validsegmentations from spurious ones because they ignore mean-ing. For example, a system that correctly discovers ”add /z/”as a valid morphological transform (song-songs, year-years)might incorrectly infer that ”add /ah.t/” is also valid (mark-market, spear-spirit). We propose that learners could avoidthese errors with a simple semantic assumption: morpholog-ical transforms approximately preserve meaning. We extendan algorithm from Chan and Yang (2008) by integrating prox-imity in vector-space word embeddings as a criterion for validtransforms. On a corpus of child-directed speech, we achieveboth higher accuracy and broader coverage than the purelyphonemic approach, even in more developmentally plausiblelearning paradigms. Finally, we consider a deeper semanticassumption that could guide the acquisition of more abstract,human-like morphological understanding.
                  Cover page: Integrating semantics into developmental models of morphology learningCreative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
                  • Article
                  • Peer Reviewed
                  Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 42 (2020)
                  We investigate the development of children’s early grammat-ical knowledge using the test case of the English regular plu-ral. Previous research points to early generalization, with chil-dren applying an abstract morphological rule to produce novelplurals well before 24 months. At the same time, childrenuse the plural inconsistently with familiar object words, anddemonstrate limited receptive knowledge of the plural in theabsence of supporting linguistic features. In the first studyto test knowledge of the plural within participants using aparadigm matched across comprehension and production, weconduct two experiments with n = 52 24-36-month-olds: aneyetracking task to evaluate what they understand, and a sto-rybook task to test how they use the plural. We manipulateboth novelty (novel vs. familiar object words) and phonolog-ical form (/s/ vs. /z/ plurals). We find strong, age-related ev-idence of productive knowledge of the plural in an expressivetask, but do not find evidence of receptive knowledge in thesesame children.
                    Cover page: Children’s Expressive and Receptive Knowledge of the English Regular PluralCreative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
                    • Article
                    • Peer Reviewed
                    Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 42 (2020)
                    Understanding a gradable adjective (e.g., big) requires mak-ing reference to a comparison class, a set of objects or entitiesagainst which the referent is implicitly compared (e.g., big fora Great Dane), but how do listeners decide upon a compari-son class? Simple models of semantic composition stipulatethat the adjective combines with a noun, which necessarily be-comes the comparison class (e.g., “That Great Dane is big”means big for a Great Dane). We investigate an alternativehypothesis built on the idea that the utility of a noun in anadjectival utterance can be either for reference (getting the lis-tener to attend to the right object) or predication (describing aproperty of the referent). Therefore, we hypothesize that whenthe presence of a noun N can be explained away by its util-ity in reference (e.g., being in the subject position: “That N isbig”), it is less likely to set the comparison class. Across threepre-registered experiments, we find evidence that listeners usethe noun as a cue to infer comparison classes consistent with atrade-off between reference and predication. This work high-lights the complexity of the relation between the form of anutterance and its meaning.
                      Cover page: Informational goals, sentence structure, and comparison class inferenceCreative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
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