Experiments using Ostia for a language production task
Dana Angluin, Leonor Becerra-Bonache · 2009
The phenomenon of meaning-preserving corrections given by an adult to a child involves several aspects: (1) the child produces an incorrect utterance, which the adult nevertheless understands, (2) the adult produces a correct utterance with the same meaning and (3) the child recognizes the adult utterance as having the same meaning as its previous utterance, and takes that as a signal that its previous utterance is not correct according to the adult grammar. An adequate model of this phenomenon must incorporate utterances and meanings, account for how the child and adult can understand each other's meanings, and model how meaning-preserving corrections interact with the child's increasing mastery of language production. In this paper we are concerned with how a learner who has learned to comprehend utterances might go about learning to produce them.