paper: Modeling the Emergence of Lexicons in Homesign Systems

[Mark A.Mandel]

I just learned of this paper via Penn's "Penn News Today" general-interest mail:

Modeling the Emergence of Lexicons in Homesign Systems  
Russell Richie (Univ. of Connecticut, Psych), Charles Yang (UPenn, Ling & CS), Marie Coppola (Univ. of Connecticut, Psych)

The news item itself was about a different study, more attention-grabbing but not so much on topic here:
Penn Research Shows That Young Children Have Grammar and Chimpanzees Don’t .
The paper is here.

The article is brief and not too careful: taken literally ("the same predictive models..."), it says that Yang analyzed Nim Chimpsky's utterances for frequency of constructions such as "a NP" vs. "the NP", which of course is a distinction specific to English and not found in ASL. Thankfully, that's just another instance of the journalistic tendencies we're all too familiar with, and the next paragraph is a more accurate summary: "Nim’s signs show significantly lower diversity than what is expected under a systematic grammar and were similar to the level expected with memorization." (Read "Nim's syntax" for "Nim's signs".)

--
Mark A. Mandel
Linguistic Data Consortium
University of Pennsylvania



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/slling-l/attachments/20130415/05723114/attachment.htm>