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. 2024 Jan;51(1):1-36.
doi: 10.1017/S0305000922000502. Epub 2022 Nov 10.

Context-Dependent Learning of Linguistic Disjunction

Masoud Jasbi  1 , Akshay Jaggi  2 , Eve V Clark  3 , Michael C Frank  3
Affiliations

Context-Dependent Learning of Linguistic Disjunction

Masoud Jasbi et al. J Child Lang. 2024 Jan.

Abstract

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.

Keywords: Disjunction; Language Acquisition; Language Development; Logical Words.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests: The author(s) declare none.

Figures

Figure 15.
Figure 15.
Inter-annotator agreement for disjunction examples.
Figure 16.
Figure 16.
Inter-annotator agreement for conjunction examples.
Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Left: The relative frequency of and/or (permil) in the speech of parents and children. 95% binomial proportion confidence intervals calculated using Agresti-Coull’s approximate method. Right: The monthly relative frequency of and/or (permil) in parents and children’s speech between 12 and 72 months (1–6 years).
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Left: Relative frequency of and/or (permil) in declaratives, imperatives, and interrogatives for parents (green) and children (blue). Right: Proportion of declaratives to questions (percent) in parent-child interactions by child-age.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Relative frequency of and/or (permil) in declaratives and questions for parents and childern between the child-age of 12 and 72 months (1–6 years).
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Linear model predictions and the relative frequency of and/or (permil) in declaratives and questions for parents and childern between the child-age of 12 (represented as 0 on the x-axis) and 72 months (represented as 60 on the x-axis).
Figure 5.
Figure 5.
Left: Monthly proportions of children’s yes/no (YN) and alternative (AB) answers to questions with or. Right: Monthly proportions of children’s appropriate answers to questions with or.
Figure 6.
Figure 6.
Connective Interpretations broken down by lexical items and (conjunction) and or (disjunction).
Figure 7.
Figure 7.
Interpretations of disjunction in child-directed speech with consistent vs. inconsistent disjuncts.
Figure 8.
Figure 8.
Interpretations of disjunction with consistent disjuncts in interrogative, imperative, and declarative utterances.
Figure 9.
Figure 9.
Interpretations of disjunction with consistent disjuncts with flat, rising, or rise-fall intonation types.
Figure 10.
Figure 10.
Distribution of connective interpretations for consistent disjuncts with flat intonation broken down by whether a modal or negative morpheme was present in the utterance.
Figure 11.
Figure 11.
Interpretations of clausal vs. sub-clausal disjunction in all the annotated utterances.
Figure 12.
Figure 12.
Interpretations of disjunction in different communicative functions.
Figure 13.
Figure 13.
(A) The structure for the baseline (highest Gini threshold, 0.2) decision tree trained on examples with exclusive (EX) and non-exclusive (IN) interpretations. (B) The structure for the cue-based decision tree (low Gini threshold of 0.01). The average F1 score with 95% confidence intervals as a function of the number of training examples in the baseline and cue-based model when treating as positive (C) EX and (D) IN respectively.
Figure 14.
Figure 14.
(A) The structure for the baseline (highest Gini threshold, 0.2) decision tree trained on examples with XOR, IOR, AND, and NOR interpretations. (B) The structure for the cue-based decision tree (low Gini threshold of 0.01). The average F1 score with 95% confidence intervals as a function of the number of training examples in the baseline and cue-based model when treating as positive (C) AND, (D) XOR, (E) IOR, (F) NOR respectively.
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References

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