Higher order inference in verb argument structure acquisition

Successful language learning combines generalization and the acquisition of lexical constraints. The conflict is particularly clear for verb argument structures, which may generalize to new verbs (John gorped the ball to Bill ->John gorped Bill the ball), yet resist generalization with certain lexical items (John carried the ball to Bill -> *John carried Bill the ball). The resulting learnability “paradox” (Baker 1979) has received great attention in the acquisition literature. Wonnacott, Newport & Tanenhaus 2008 demonstrated that adult learners acquire both general and verb-specific patterns when acquiring an artificial language with two competing argument structures, and that these same constraints are reflected in real time processing. The current work follows up and extends this program of research in two new experiments. We demonstrate that the results are consistent with a hierarchical Bayesian model, originally developed by Kemp, Perfors & Tenebaum (2007) to capture the emergence of feature biases in word learning