Language acquisition with communication between learners

Ibsen-Jensen, Rasmus, Tkadlec, Josef, Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Nowak, Martin A (2018) Language acquisition with communication between learners. JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY INTERFACE, 15 (140). 20180073-.

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	language learning, inductive inference, population structures in learning
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	06 Dec 2018 09:41
Last Modified:	19 Jan 2023 01:10
DOI:	10.1098/rsif.2018.0073
Related URLs:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3029559