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A fundamental task in sentence comprehension involves assigning semantic roles to sentence constituents, thus determining "who does what to whom." The syntactic bootstrapping theory proposes that even very young children use precursors of the adult's knowledge of syntax to accomplish this task. The project combines experimental and computational approaches to test and refine this theory. This research overlaps with NIH-sponsored “Modeling Early Language Acquisition” (NIH Grant R01-HD054448) and is in collaboration with Cynthia Fisher, UIUC Professor of Psychology (http://www.psych.uiuc.edu/people/showprofile.php?id=10).
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A fundamental task in sentence comprehension is to assign semantic roles to sentence constituents. The structure-mapping account proposes that children start with a shallow structural analysis of sentences: children treat the number of nouns in the sentence as a cue to its semantic predicate-argument structure, and represent language experience in an abstract format that permits rapid generalization to new verbs. In this project, we test the consequences of these representational assumptions via experiments with a system for automatic semantic role labeling (SRL), trained on a sample of child-directed speech. We show the SRL system can use incremental knowledge gain to switch from error-prone noun order features to a more accurate representation, demonstrating a possible mechanism for this process in child development.
This research overlaps with NSF-sponsored “Verb Learning and The Early Development of Sentence Comprehension: Experimental and Computational Studies” (NSF BCS-0620257) and is in collaboration with Cynthia Fisher, UIUC Professor of Psychology
(http://www.psych.uiuc.edu/people/showprofile.php?id=10).