Connectionist Modeling of Experience-based Effects in Sentence ...

GPE
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English SRC
rep. that attacked the senator praised the judge
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Chapter 4 Two SRN Prediction Studies
GPE
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English ORC
rep. that the sen. attacked praised the judge
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Figure 4.1: Replication of MacDonald and Christiansen (2002)
4.3 RC Extraction in Mandarin
4.3.1 Simulation 1: Regularity
Model Parameters
The first simulation should assess the degree of the regularity advantage the ORC receives
due to its canonical word order. A regularity effect is assessable only when the frequencies
of both RC types in the corpora are identical. Therefore the SRC and the ORC received
the same probability in the generation grammar. Although the replications were done
with an RC probability of 0.1, I used the original value of 0.05, reported in MacDonald
and Christiansen (2002), for the Mandarin regularity simulation. Compared to English
the Chinese grammar used here is very simple. Setting the RC probability too high
could speed up in the learning process in a way that conceals training effects.
The Grammar The grammar used to generate the corpora covered simple regular
Mandarin SVO sentences as well as SR and OR clauses. Relative clause attachment
could happen at every noun with a probability of 0.05. The embedding depth was
theoretically unlimited but with the small attachment probability of 0.05 the longest
sentence in the corpora had a length of 16 words. The 17-word lexicon consisted of 9
plural and singular nouns, three transitive and four intransitive verbs, of which one (lijie
“understand”) belongs to both categories, the relativizer de and the EOS. Note however,
that there is no number agreement between nouns and verbs in Mandarin. The full
lexicon is given in the Appendix. Note further that in normal Mandarin intransitive
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