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Acquisition of desires before beliefs: A computational investigation

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

The acquisition of Belief verbs lags behind the acquisition of Desire verbs in children. Some psycholinguistic theories attribute this lag to conceptual differences between the two classes, while others suggest that syntactic differences are responsible. Through computational experiments, we show that a probabilistic verb learning model exhibits the pattern of acquisition, even though there is no difference in the model in the difficulty of the semantic or syntactic properties of Belief vs. Desire verbs. Our results point to the distributional properties of various verb classes as a potentially important, and heretofore unexplored, factor in the observed developmental lag of Belief verbs.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCoNLL 2013 - 17th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, Proceedings
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages231-240
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781937284701
StatePublished - 2013
Event17th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, CoNLL 2013 - Sofia, Bulgaria
Duration: 8 Aug 20139 Aug 2013

Publication series

NameCoNLL 2013 - 17th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, Proceedings

Conference

Conference17th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, CoNLL 2013
Country/TerritoryBulgaria
CitySofia
Period8/08/139/08/13

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