Collocational bootstrapping: A hypothesis about the learning of subject-verb agreement in humans and neural networks

arXiv:2605.20529v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In what ways might statistical signals in linguistic input assist with the acquisition of syntax? Here we hypothesize a mechanism called collocational bootstrapping, in which regularities in word co-occurrence patterns can provide cues to syntactic dependencies. We investigate whether this mechanism can support the acquisition of English subject-verb agreement. First, we simulate language acquisition by training neural networks on synthetic datasets that vary in how predictable their subject-verb pairings are. We find that there is a range of var

Source: arXiv cs.CL — read the full report at the original publisher.

This is a curated wire item. The Continuum Brief does not republish full third-party articles; this entry links to the original source.