A Developmental Model of Syntax Acquisition in the Construction Grammar Framework with Cross-Linguistic Validation in English and Japanese

The current research demonstrates a system inspired by cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology that learns to construct mappings between the grammatical structure of sentences and the structure of their meaning representations. Sentence to meaning mappings are learned and stored as grammatical constructions. These are stored and retrieved from a construction inventory based on the constellation of closed class items uniquely identifying each construction. These learned mappings allow the system to processes natural language sentences in order to reconstruct complex internal representations of the meanings these sentences describe. The system demonstrates error free performance and systematic generalization for a rich subset of English constructions that includes complex hierarchical grammatical structure, and generalizes systematically to new sentences of the learned construction categories. Further testing demonstrates (1) the capability to accommodate a significantly extended set of constructions, and (2) extension to Japanese, a free word order language that is structurally quite different from English, thus demonstrating the extensibility of the structure mapping model.