The New Sesquipedalian

Our visitor Petra Hendriks will be talking about “On the relation between grammar, acquisition and processing: A case study in pronoun interpretation” today at 1:15pm in the Greenberg Room. Here are some details:

The Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) in language acquisition is a well-known effect that has motivated widely distinct views on the relation between grammar and other linguistic resources necessary for sentence interpretation. In this talk I discuss a computational model that colleagues in Groningen and I recently developed within the cognitive architecture ACT-R (Van Rij et al., 2009; in press). This cognitive model is based on an optimality theoretic account that attributes the DPBE to children’s inability as hearers to also take into account the speaker’s perspective (Hendriks & Spenader, 2005/6). The cognitive model predicts that child hearers are unable to take into account the speaker’s perspective because their speed of linguistic processing is too limited to perform this second step in interpretation. We tested this hypothesis empirically in a psycholinguistic study, in which we slowed down the speech rate to give children more time for interpretation, and in a computational simulation study. The results of the two studies confirm the predictions of our model. Moreover, these studies show that embedding a theory of linguistic competence in a cognitive architecture allows for the generation of detailed and testable predictions with respect to linguistic performance.