1. Evidence for the centrality of experience

2.  Psycholinguistic Studies of Entrenchment Catherine L. Harris (1997)  Constrains on Statistical learning Jenny R. Saffran (2002)

3. Outline of Lecture  The big picture  Idiom-level representation  Collocation level representation  Statistical learning  Conclusions

4. The big picture Psycholinguistics Computation

5. Evidence for the Centrality of Experience  Entrenchment  Statistics  Performance

6. Entrenched expressions  Words (Carr 1986)  Common word combinations (collocations)  Multi word idioms

7. Does “ Idiom Level ” of Representation exist ? (Harris 1997)  Priming  Semantic priming Spreading activation Semantic integration Great minds think alike  Great minds  alike  Minds think  alike

8. Idiom level Great minds think alike  42 - 4 words idiom Contiguous with target Noncontiguous with target  30 – first two words best eliciting  12 – middle two words best eliciting.  Associative and Semantic trios baby, cradle -> bottle-semantic ear, foot -> mouth-associative doctor, nurse -> surgeon-both

9. Results  Degree of priming Semantic – 57 Associated – 42 Both - 65 Idioms – 44  No difference between the groups

10. Results Prime was: Best elicited idioms

11. Conclusions so Far …  Idiom Level of Representation exist  Syntactic schema

12. Does Collocation Level of Representation exist ? (Harris 1997)  Is priming good enough? Cradle -> baby  Processing letters Word Superior Effect -Carr(1986)  Random word pairs vs. collocation

13. Collocation TAX BILL XGXG

14. Collocation lettersNon- collocation Collocation neighbor CollocationSingle word X GTax deepTax bellTax billTax N ENight wallNight clueNight clubNight R UOpen worldTree worldFree worldworld

15. Collocation  Letter detection was better in the collocation than in other stimuli.  “ sophisticated guessing ”  Collocation “ friends ” Bog down/bow down  Superiority of detection of words in collocation remains

16. Collocation  Are collocations activated in response to partial input?  Trick items Tag bill Eight club  Accuracy impaired 65% trick condition 90% collocation condition

17. Conclusions so Far …  Idiom Level of Representation exist  Syntactic schema  Collocation level representation exist Polysemous words interpretation Child language acquisition Computation

18. Constraints on Statistical Learning (Safran 2002)  Predictive dependencies affect learnability of sequential structures  Domains

19. Constraints on Statistical Learning (Safran 2002)  Combinatorial explosion  Source of the constraints  Linear input to Nonlinear structure (the professor (graded (the exam)) Innate knowledge Dependency relations between categories

20. Word categories

21. Language P vs. Language N

22. Rules for both languages

23. Results resultLinguistic?StimuliSequential/ simultaneously P>n> ½ Yes/noAuditorySequential P=n> ½ Yes/noVisuallySequential P>n> ½ Yes/noVisuallysimultaneously

24. Results  Adults p > n  Children p>n  Other domains

25. Conclusions  Language evolved to fit the human learner  Similarities among human languages may reflect constrains to fit human learner  Bridge between nature and nurture

26. Summary  Entrenchment Representation of idioms Representation of collocations Representation of words  Statistics Between words Between word categories Phonemes Letters  Performance Acquiring predictable language using idioms or collocations