Modelling the Cross-Linguistic Pattern of Verb-Marking Deficits in Children With Developmental Language Disorder, 2019-2025

WP1.3 - Modelling the cross-linguistic pattern of verb-marking deficits in children with developmental language disorder Daniel Freudenthal, Fernand Gobet, Larry Leonard and Julian Pine (Lead)

This work package is a modelling project, which uses existing publicly available corpora of naturalistic speech to test different hypotheses about the way typically developing children and children with DLD acquire language (and in particular) verb inflection. Since no behavioural data were collected, there are no spreadsheets of behavioural data to upload. However, where possible, we provide relevant scripts and output and analysis files for the 4 studies that make up the work package.

These files are organised into three folders as follows:

1. Language Learning Paper contains files relating to a study of the effect of adding a defaulting mechanism to MOSAIC – a computational model of the cross-linguistic pattern of verb-marking error. A paper describing this model has been published in Language Learning:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lang.12580

2. Rescorla Paper contains files relating to a study that uses a modified version of the classic Rescorla-Wagner model to simulate differences in the ease with which both TD children and children with DLD master English and Spanish verb inflection. The simulations show that these differences can be understood in terms of the interaction between a deficit in sequential learning ability and the structure and statistics of English and Spanish child-directed speech. A paper describing this work has been published in Cognitive Science.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/cogs.12945

3. Deep learning contains files relating to a series of studies in which we investigated the suitability of modern Generative AI models to simulate aspects of language acquistion in both typically developing children and in children with DLD. This work has been published in the proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science society and can be found at the following links:
https://escholarship.org/content/qt9gr4v5rb/qt9gr4v5rb.pdf
https://escholarship.org/content/qt3pg3q39r/qt3pg3q39r.pdf