A model of Frame and Verb Compliance in language acquisition

Researchers studying word learning have discovered that the syntactic frame in which a word appears plays an important role in the interpretation of the word, and this importance diminishes gradually with increasing age. Interpretation of sentences based on the frame and the verb is known as Frame and Verb Compliance, respectively. Here, a connectionist model is presented that explains this shift from Frame of Verb Compliance in terms of competition between two cues—the frame and the verb—that predict causality. The model learns a miniature language by associating sentences with the corresponding “scenes”. The most frequent cues, the frames, are learned first, resulting in frame compliance in the initial phase of learning. As the learning progresses, the less frequent but more powerful cues, the verbs, are learned and prevail over the frames resulting in verb compliance. It is argued that these phenomena can be attributed to the interaction between properties of the input and the learning mechanism, and it is not necessary to invoke specialized principles.