IST Austria, Klosterneuburg 3400, Austria
IST Austria, Klosterneuburg 3400, Austria.
J R Soc Interface. 2018 Mar;15(140). doi: 10.1098/rsif.2018.0073.
We consider a class of students learning a language from a teacher. The situation can be interpreted as a group of child learners receiving input from the linguistic environment. The teacher provides sample sentences. The students try to learn the grammar from the teacher. In addition to just listening to the teacher, the students can also communicate with each other. The students hold hypotheses about the grammar and change them if they receive counter evidence. The process stops when all students have converged to the correct grammar. We study how the time to convergence depends on the structure of the classroom by introducing and evaluating various complexity measures. We find that structured communication between students, although potentially introducing confusion, can greatly reduce some of the complexity measures. Our theory can also be interpreted as applying to the scientific process, where nature is the teacher and the scientists are the students.
我们考虑了一类学生向教师学习语言的情况。这种情况可以被解释为一群儿童学习者从语言环境中接收输入。教师提供示例句子。学生们试图从教师那里学习语法。除了听老师讲课，学生们还可以相互交流。学生们对语法持有假设，如果收到反例证据，他们会改变这些假设。当所有学生都收敛到正确的语法时，这个过程就停止了。我们通过引入和评估各种复杂度度量来研究课堂结构如何影响收敛时间。我们发现，学生之间的结构化交流虽然可能会引入混淆，但可以大大降低某些复杂度度量。我们的理论也可以解释为适用于科学过程，其中自然是教师，而科学家是学生。
