{"pk":33068,"title":"Inducing a Grammar Without an Explicit Teacher: Incremental Distributed Prediction Feedback","subtitle":null,"abstract":"A primary problem for a child learning her first language \nis that her ungrammatical utterances are rarely explicitly \ncorrected. It has been argued that this dearth of negative \nevidence regarding the child's grammatical hypotheses \nmakes it impossible for the child to induce the grammar of \nthe language without substantial innate knowledge of \nsome universal principles common to all natural \ngrammars. However, recent connectionist models of \nlanguage acquisition have employed a learning technique \nthat circumvents the negative evidence problem. \nMoreover, this learning strategy is not limited to strictly \nconnectionist architectures. What we call Incremental \nDistributed Prediction Feedback refers to when the learner \nsimply listens to utterances in its environment and makes \ninternal predictions on-line as to what elements of the \ngrammar are more or less likely to immediately follow the \ncurrent input. Once that subsequent input is received, \nthose prediction contingencies (essentially, transitional \nprobabilities) are slightly adjusted accordingly. \nSimulations with artificial grammars demonstrate that this \nlearning strategy is faster and more realistic than \ndepending on infrequent negative feedback to \nungrammatical output Incremental Distributed Prediction \nFeedback allows the learner to produce its own negative \nevidence from positive examples of the language by \ncomparing incrementally predicted input with actual input.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"17","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4d70s753","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Michael","middle_name":"","last_name":"Spivey-Knowlton","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Rochester","department":""},{"first_name":"Jenny","middle_name":"R .","last_name":"Saffran","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Rochester","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"1995-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/33068/galley/24129/download/"}]}