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Recursive Inconsistencies Are Hard to Learn: A Connectionist Perspective on
Universal Word Order Correlations
Morten H. Christiansen (MORTEN@GIZMO.USC.EDU)
Joseph T. Devlin (JDEVLIN@CS.USC.EDU)
Program in Neural, Informational and Behavioral Sciences
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA 90089­2520

Abstract Across the languages of the world there is a high degree of consistency with respect to the ordering of heads of phrases. Within the generative approach to language these correlational universals have been taken to support the idea of innate lin­ guistic constraints on word order. In contrast, we suggest that the tendency towards word order consistency may emerge from non­linguistic constraints on the learning of highly struc­ tured temporal sequences,of which humanlanguagesare prime examples. First, an analysis of recursive consistency within phrase­structure rules is provided, showing how inconsistency may impede learning. Results are then presented from connec­ tionist simulations involving simple recurrent networks with­ out linguistic biases, demonstrating that recursive inconsisten­ cies directly affect the learnability of a language. Finally, typo­ logical language data are presented, suggesting that the word order patterns which are infrequent among the world's lan­ guages are the ones which are recursively inconsistent as well as being the patterns which are hard for the nets to learn. We therefore conclude that innate linguistic knowledge may not be necessary to explain word order universals.
Introduction There is a statistical tendency across human languages to con­ form to a form in which the head of a phrase consistently is placed in the same position---either first or last---with respect to the remaining clause material. English is considered to be a head­first language, meaning that the head is most frequently placed first in a phrase, as when the verb is placed before the object NP in a transitive VP such as `eat curry'. In contrast, ...

@inproceedings{christiansen97recursiveInconsistencies,
  author={M. H. Christiansen and J. T. Devlin},
  title={Recursive inconsistencies are hard to learn: A connectionist perspective on universal word order correlations},
  year={1997},
  month={August},
  pages={113-118},
  address={Mahwah, NJ},
  publisher={Lawrence Erlbaum Associates},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society},
  url={http://groups.lis.illinois.edu/amag/langev/paper/christiansen97recursiveInconsistencies.html}
}

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