McCauley Stewart M, Christiansen Morten H
Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Liverpool.
Department of Psychology, Cornell University.
Top Cogn Sci. 2017 Jul;9(3):637-652. doi: 10.1111/tops.12258. Epub 2017 May 8.
Second-language learners rarely arrive at native proficiency in a number of linguistic domains, including morphological and syntactic processing. Previous approaches to understanding the different outcomes of first- versus second-language learning have focused on cognitive and neural factors. In contrast, we explore the possibility that children and adults may rely on different linguistic units throughout the course of language learning, with specific focus on the granularity of those units. Following recent psycholinguistic evidence for the role of multiword chunks in online language processing, we explore the hypothesis that children rely more heavily on multiword units in language learning than do adults learning a second language. To this end, we take an initial step toward using large-scale, corpus-based computational modeling as a tool for exploring the granularity of speakers' linguistic units. Employing a computational model of language learning, the Chunk-Based Learner, we compare the usefulness of chunk-based knowledge in accounting for the speech of second-language learners versus children and adults speaking their first language. Our findings suggest that while multiword units are likely to play a role in second-language learning, adults may learn less useful chunks, rely on them to a lesser extent, and arrive at them through different means than children learning a first language.
第二语言学习者在包括形态和句法处理在内的多个语言领域中很少能达到母语水平。以往理解第一语言和第二语言学习不同结果的方法主要集中在认知和神经因素上。相比之下，我们探讨了儿童和成人在语言学习过程中可能依赖不同语言单位的可能性，特别关注这些单位的粒度。基于近期心理语言学关于多词块在在线语言处理中作用的证据，我们探讨了这样一个假设：在语言学习中，儿童比学习第二语言的成年人更依赖多词单位。为此，我们朝着使用大规模、基于语料库的计算建模作为探索说话者语言单位粒度的工具迈出了第一步。我们采用一种语言学习的计算模型——基于块的学习者，比较基于块的知识在解释第二语言学习者以及说第一语言的儿童和成人的言语方面的有用性。我们的研究结果表明，虽然多词单位可能在第二语言学习中发挥作用，但成年人学到的有用块较少，对它们的依赖程度较低，并且获得这些块的方式与学习第一语言的儿童不同。
