Language acquisition with communication between learners.

ABSTRACT: We consider a class of students learning a language from a teacher. The situation can be interpreted as a group of child learners receiving input from the linguistic environment. The teacher provides sample sentences. The students try to learn the grammar from the teacher. In addition to just listening to the teacher, the students can also communicate with each other. The students hold hypotheses about the grammar and change them if they receive counter evidence. The process stops when all students have converged to the correct grammar. We study how the time to convergence depends on the structure of the classroom by introducing and evaluating various complexity measures. We find that structured communication between students, although potentially introducing confusion, can greatly reduce

SUBMITTER: Ibsen-Jensen R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5908541 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature