Learning to Speak: A Connectionist Model of Syntax Acquisition and Sentence Production Recent psycholinguistic research has suggested that language learning and language processing are tightly linked both in children and adults. In adults, evidence for this link comes from an experimental technique called structural priming, where the abstract structure of previously heard utterances can influence the structure that speaker uses to describe a picture. Using this technique, Bock and Griffin (2000) found that structural priming persists over time and further processing, which suggested that long term changes had occur in the syntactic representations that the adult speakers were using. This result suggests that syntactic representations are constantly being tuned to a person’s input experience. I have developed a connectionist model of syntax acquisition and adult sentence production that can explain this result as well as a variety of other results from structural priming and syntax acquisition experiments (Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006). To learn the syntax of the language, the model uses an error-based learning algorithm (a learning algorithm that can learn abstract internal representations) and a particular network architecture to abstract syntactic representations from meaning-sentence pairs that are given as input. The model can explain the long-term persistence of priming because its syntax acquisition mechanism (error-based learning in particular architecture) continues to function in adulthood, and learning during processing of the prime causes subtle changes that influence later processing. One outcome of the error-based learning mechanism in the model is that that the syntax that it learns is not of a consistent type. The learned representations in the model can explain experimental results which suggest that thematic roles are not strongly tied to syntactic frames (Bock & Loebell, 1990) as well as results suggesting that syntactic frames distinguish different orders of thematic roles (Chang, Bock, & Goldberg, 2003). The model’s syntax acquisition mechanism suggests that different linguistic types might govern the syntax in different constructions in adult processing. The implications of these results for linguistic theories will be discussed. Bock, K., & Griffin, Z. M. (2000). The persistence of structural priming: Transient activation or implicit learning? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129(2), 177-192.
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