Roberts, S G; Cuskley, C; McCrohon, L; Barceló-Coblijn, L; Fehér, O; Verhoef, T (Ed.): The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANGX11), 2016.
@inproceedings{evolang11_119,
title = {The Emergence Of Rules And Exceptions In A Population Of Interacting Agents},
author = {Christine Cuskley and Vittorio Loreto},
editor = {S.G. Roberts and C. Cuskley and L. McCrohon and L. Barceló-Coblijn and O. Fehér and T. Verhoef},
url = {http://evolang.org/neworleans/papers/119.html},
year = {2016},
date = {2016-01-01},
booktitle = {The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANGX11)},
abstract = {Rules are an efficient feature of natural languages which allow speakers to use a finite set of instructions to generate a virtually infinite set of utterances. Yet, for many regular rules, there are irregular exceptions. There has been lively debate in cognitive science about how individual learners acquire rules and exceptions; for example, how they learn the past tense of preach is preached, but for teach it is taught. In this paper, we take a different perspective, examining the dynamics of regularity and irregularity across a population of interacting agents to investigate how inflectional rules are applied to verbs. We show that in the absence of biases towards either regularity or irregularity, the outcome is determined by the initial condition, irrespective of the frequency of usage of the given lemma. On the other hand, in presence of biases, rule systems exhibit frequency dependent patterns in regularity reminiscent of patterns in natural language corpora. We examine the case where individuals are biased towards linguistic regularity in two ways: either as child learners, or through a memory constraint wherein irregular forms can only be remembered by an individual agent for a finite time period. We provide theoretical arguments for the prediction of a critical frequency below which irregularity cannot persist in terms of the duration of the finite time period which constrains agent memory.},
keywords = {cuskley, kreyon, language_dynamics, language_games, loreto, modeling, rules},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}
Rules are an efficient feature of natural languages which allow speakers to use a finite set of instructions to generate a virtually infinite set of utterances. Yet, for many regular rules, there are irregular exceptions. There has been lively debate in cognitive science about how individual learners acquire rules and exceptions; for example, how they learn the past tense of preach is preached, but for teach it is taught. In this paper, we take a different perspective, examining the dynamics of regularity and irregularity across a population of interacting agents to investigate how inflectional rules are applied to verbs. We show that in the absence of biases towards either regularity or irregularity, the outcome is determined by the initial condition, irrespective of the frequency of usage of the given lemma. On the other hand, in presence of biases, rule systems exhibit frequency dependent patterns in regularity reminiscent of patterns in natural language corpora. We examine the case where individuals are biased towards linguistic regularity in two ways: either as child learners, or through a memory constraint wherein irregular forms can only be remembered by an individual agent for a finite time period. We provide theoretical arguments for the prediction of a critical frequency below which irregularity cannot persist in terms of the duration of the finite time period which constrains agent memory.
@article{Cuskley2015205,
title = {The adoption of linguistic rules in native and non-native speakers: Evidence from a Wug task},
author = {Christine Cuskley and Francesca Colaiori and Claudio Castellano and Vittorio Loreto and Martina Pugliese and Francesca Tria},
url = {http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X15000790},
doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2015.06.005},
issn = {0749-596X},
year = {2015},
date = {2015-01-01},
journal = {Journal of Memory and Language},
volume = {84},
pages = {205 - 223},
abstract = {Several recent theories have suggested that an increase in the number of non-native speakers in a language can lead to changes in morphological rules. We examine this experimentally by contrasting the performance of native and non-native English speakers in a simple Wug-task, showing that non-native speakers are significantly more likely to provide non -ed (i.e., irregular) past-tense forms for novel verbs than native speakers. Both groups are sensitive to sound similarities between new words and existing words (i.e., are more likely to provide irregular forms for novel words which sound similar to existing irregulars). Among both natives and non-natives, irregularizations are non-random; that is, rather than presenting as truly irregular inflectional strategies, they follow identifiable sub-rules present in the highly frequent set of irregular English verbs. Our results shed new light on how native and non-native learners can affect language structure.},
keywords = {castellano, colaiori, cuskley, experiment, kreyon, language_dynamics, loreto, pugliese, rules, Sociolinguistics, tria},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}
Several recent theories have suggested that an increase in the number of non-native speakers in a language can lead to changes in morphological rules. We examine this experimentally by contrasting the performance of native and non-native English speakers in a simple Wug-task, showing that non-native speakers are significantly more likely to provide non -ed (i.e., irregular) past-tense forms for novel verbs than native speakers. Both groups are sensitive to sound similarities between new words and existing words (i.e., are more likely to provide irregular forms for novel words which sound similar to existing irregulars). Among both natives and non-natives, irregularizations are non-random; that is, rather than presenting as truly irregular inflectional strategies, they follow identifiable sub-rules present in the highly frequent set of irregular English verbs. Our results shed new light on how native and non-native learners can affect language structure.
