Search for: All records

We studied the learnability of English filler-gap dependencies and the “island” constraints on them by assessing the generalizations made by autoregressive (incremental) language models that use deep learning to predict the next word given preceding context. Using factorial tests inspired by experimental psycholinguistics, we found that models acquire not only the basic contingency between fillers and gaps, but also the unboundedness and hierarchical constraints implicated in the dependency. We evaluated a model’s acquisition of island constraints by demonstrating that its expectation for a filler-gap contingency is attenuated within an island environment. Our results provide empirical evidence against the argument from the poverty of the stimulus for this particular structure. 

When a language offers multiple options for expressing the same meaning, what principles govern a speaker’s choice? Two well-known principles proposed for explaining wideranging speaker preference are Uniform Information Density and Availability-Based Production. Here we test the predictions of these theories in a previously uninvestigated case of speaker choice. Russian has two ways of expressing the comparative: an EXPLICIT option (Ona bystree chem ja/She fast- COMP than me-NOM) and a GENITIVE option (Ona bystree menya/She fast-COMP me-GEN). We lay out several potential predictions of each theory for speaker choice in the Russian comparative construction, including effects of postcomparative word predictability, phrase length, syntactic complexity, and semantic association between the comparative adjective and subsequent noun. In a corpus study, we find that the explicit construction is used preferentially when the postcomparative noun phrase is longer, has a relative clause, and is less semantically associated with the comparative adjective. A follow-up production experiment using visual scene stimuli to elicit comparative sentences replicates the corpus finding that Russian native speakers prefer the explicit form when post-comparative phrases are longer. These findings offer no clear support for the predictions of Uniform Information Density, but are broadly supportive of Availability- Based Production, with the explicit option serving as an unreduced form that eases speakers’ planning of complex or lowavailability utterances. Code for this study is available