{"pk":21568,"title":"Readily grasping 'who' and 'whom': child-directed speech facilitates semantic role learning","subtitle":null,"abstract":"A key aspect in child language development involves inducing\nthe rules that determine the relations of the arguments to\ntheir verbal predicate, i.e., semantic roles. Here, we investigate\nwhether child-directed speech facilitates learning ‘who\ndoes what to whom' in English and Russian, two languages\nthat strongly differ in their amount of case-marking and word\norder variation. We ask whether a contextual, distributional\nlearner can more easily learn to assign semantic roles to arguments\nbased on child-directed speech versus adult-directed\nspeech. To this end, we represent the arguments of a verb\nwith contextualised word embeddings extracted from neural\nlanguage models. We compare the classification accuracy\nof semantic roles based on these representations between utterances\nextracted from corpora of child-directed speech and\nadult-directed speech. We further study to what extent semantic\nroles can be predicted based on arguments represented\nby different levels of information, such as non-contextualised\nrepresentations, the position in the sentence, and case marking.\nWe find that child-directed speech facilitates the learning\nof semantic roles, an important cornerstone for learning the\nmorphosyntactic features of a language. However, the effect\nof child-directed speech is more pronounced in Russian than\nin English, indicating that child-directed speech may be optimised\nmore strongly in a language where arguments are expressed\nin more varied forms and positions, as is the case in\nRussian.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7k03n2gb","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Eva","middle_name":"","last_name":"Huber","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Zurich","department":""},{"first_name":"Sabine","middle_name":"","last_name":"Stoll","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Zurich","department":""},{"first_name":"Balthasar","middle_name":"","last_name":"Bickel","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Zurich","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2024-01-01T12:00:00-06:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21568/galley/11167/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21568/galley/21961/download/"}]}