5 The Catapult Hypothesis: An Approach to Unlearning Janet H. Randall Northeastern University PAR... more 5 The Catapult Hypothesis: An Approach to Unlearning Janet H. Randall Northeastern University PARAMETRIC VS. NON-PARAMETRIC LEARNING: TRADITIONAL ASSUMPTIONS The" principles and parameters" approach to linguistic theory has spawned a flurry of research in ...
The Northeastern University Linguistics and Law Lab aims to improve justice and make legal langua... more The Northeastern University Linguistics and Law Lab aims to improve justice and make legal language accessible through linguistic research. Our current research program focuses on identifying and minimizing the most challenging linguistic factors in jury instructions. So far, our results show that factors like passive verbs and legalese make jury instructions harder to understand. We can improve comprehension significantly by minimizing these factors and providing written texts along with spoken instructions. It is only through fostering connections with the legal community that our research has been impactful. We accomplish this by publishing outside our discipline, collaborating at interdisciplinary meetings, and working directly with legal professionals. In conjunction with the Northeastern School of Law, we hosted a conference where academics and legal professionals examined justice through a linguistic lens. We have also appeared in professional publications in both law and lin...
Children's acquisition of agent nouns,within a framework of morphological structural principl... more Children's acquisition of agent nouns,within a framework of morphological structural principles is explored. Languagelcquisition has been conceptualized as a process of parameter setting in which the learner is richly endowed witiv a vocabulary of primitives,and rule schemata. Exposure to the primary data will be filled in from the range of options allowed by universal grammar. It is argued that while it may initially appear that learners are using rules that are incorrect for analyzing the particular data, these rules actually fit into the larger aygtem the learners are acquiring. Ch,ildren's use:of motphological structural principles in agent noun acquisition was evaluatA0 in an experiment involving 21 chijdren between the ages of 3 and 7. The results were consistent with the hypothesis that children's grammars reflect morphological structural principles within a.framework which takes into.account the logic of learnability. (RW) ****************************************...
Proceedings of the Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium 2013
In US courtrooms, judges read jurors a set of “jury instructions” to help them reach a verdict. O... more In US courtrooms, judges read jurors a set of “jury instructions” to help them reach a verdict. One Massachusetts instruction concerns jurors’ memories: “Failure of recollection is common. Innocent misrecollection is not uncommon.” Since most jurors find this – and many instructions – nearly incomprehensible, a task force of judges, lawyers, and linguists has started a project for reform. The project began by testing how well a sample of instructions is understood. In one experiment, subjects heard six sample jury instructions and answered true/false questions about them. The results showed that comprehension varied with linguistic complexity, significantly worse on instructions containing passive verbs and presupposed information, factors known to increase processing load. A second experiment used Plain English versions that eliminated these factors, and comprehension improved significantly. The results suggest that though legal language is entrenched and reform is difficult, psycholinguistic research can help diagnose problems and suggest a course of action toward improving verdicts – and justice – overall.
The problem of how children retreat from overgeneralizations given that they do not get "negative... more The problem of how children retreat from overgeneralizations given that they do not get "negative" evidence that a certain construction they are producing is ungrammatical is a longstanding one. For example, the dative alternation, in which some verbs participate (give NP1 to NP2 ~ give NP2 NP1) is ungrammatical for other verbs (deliver NP1 to NP2 ~ *deliver NP2 NP1). This paper proposes how a learner can retreat from this and other overgeneralizations using only positive evidence combined with linguistic principles. The principles must be stated in the form of disjunctions: Either p or q, or equivalently, if p then not q. Once the learner finds evidence for p in the language, she knows that q cannot be present, and can eliminate it. The result is a kind of "Indirect" positive evidence, positive evidence that serves as the missing negative evidence.
Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction.- A Phenomenon and a Principle: The Isomorphi... more Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction.- A Phenomenon and a Principle: The Isomorphic Linking Hypothesis - Representations - The Competition - Advantages of this Proposal - Going Forward.- Part I A Geometric Theory of Linking - 1. Conceptual Structure - Motivating Conceptual Structure: A Review of the Problems with Theta Grids - Representing Arguments and Satisfying the Theta Criterion - Building Conceptual Structure Representations - Argument Fusion and Selection - Constraining Fusion: The Prohibition Against Double Fusion - Streamlining the Set of CS Primitives - Argument Structure: The Interface Projection from CS.- 2 Eliminating the Direct/Indirect Internal Argument Distinction - Reasons to Eliminate Indirect Arguments - Apparent Problems and Their Solutions - Syntactic Category - Linear Order - Lexical Rules - Summary .- 3. Explaining Linking Regularities - A New Linking Proposal: The Isomorphic Linking Hypothesis - Causative Verbs - Simple Causative Verbs - Produc...
You are a member of a jury. After the trial, the judge reads you and your fellow jurors a set of ... more You are a member of a jury. After the trial, the judge reads you and your fellow jurors a set of instructions. One of them begins: Failure of recollection is common. Innocent misrecollection is not uncommon… Confused? Now imagine that your native language is not English or that you never finished high school. Or both. Our justice system depends on jurors making informed decisions to reach a verdict, so when jury instructions are too challenging, jurors not only disengage but return misinformed verdicts. Courtroom practices make jurors’ jobs even harder. Many states don’t provide copies of the instructions and some don’t permit jurors to take notes. Can we make instructions easier for jurors, and in so doing, improve justice? In two studies, we show that jury instruction comprehension significantly improves (a) when subjects read the texts of the instructions while listening to them and (b) when the instructions are rewritten in Plain English, minimizing two linguistic factors: passi...
The creation of internet-based mega-corpora such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (... more The creation of internet-based mega-corpora such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) (Davies, 2011a) and the Google Ngram Viewer (Cohen, 2010) signals a new phase in corpus-based research that provides both novice and expert researchers immediate access to a variety of online texts and time-coded data. This paper explores the applications of these corpora in the analysis of academic word lists, in particular, Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL). Coxhead (2011) has called for further research on the AWL with larger corpora, noting that learners’ use of academic vocabulary needs to address for the AWL to be useful in various contexts. Results show that words on the AWL are declining in overall frequency from 1990 to the present. Implications about the AWL and future directions in corpus-based research utilizing mega-corpora are discussed. La creación de megacorpus basados en Internet, tales como el Corpus of Con...
This thesis investigates the system governing complex morphological forms in English and the way ... more This thesis investigates the system governing complex morphological forms in English and the way in which this system is acquired. Theories to account for constraints on the complementation of derived forms have been developed by Carlson and Roeper (1980) and Roeper (1981b ...
The 'problem of negative evidence' has emerged as one of the seminal concerns of resear... more The 'problem of negative evidence' has emerged as one of the seminal concerns of researchers interested in language acquisition and learnability in recent years. Briefly, the kinds of errors that arise in children's over-generalizations must be able to be corrected without ...
5 The Catapult Hypothesis: An Approach to Unlearning Janet H. Randall Northeastern University PAR... more 5 The Catapult Hypothesis: An Approach to Unlearning Janet H. Randall Northeastern University PARAMETRIC VS. NON-PARAMETRIC LEARNING: TRADITIONAL ASSUMPTIONS The" principles and parameters" approach to linguistic theory has spawned a flurry of research in ...
The Northeastern University Linguistics and Law Lab aims to improve justice and make legal langua... more The Northeastern University Linguistics and Law Lab aims to improve justice and make legal language accessible through linguistic research. Our current research program focuses on identifying and minimizing the most challenging linguistic factors in jury instructions. So far, our results show that factors like passive verbs and legalese make jury instructions harder to understand. We can improve comprehension significantly by minimizing these factors and providing written texts along with spoken instructions. It is only through fostering connections with the legal community that our research has been impactful. We accomplish this by publishing outside our discipline, collaborating at interdisciplinary meetings, and working directly with legal professionals. In conjunction with the Northeastern School of Law, we hosted a conference where academics and legal professionals examined justice through a linguistic lens. We have also appeared in professional publications in both law and lin...
Children's acquisition of agent nouns,within a framework of morphological structural principl... more Children's acquisition of agent nouns,within a framework of morphological structural principles is explored. Languagelcquisition has been conceptualized as a process of parameter setting in which the learner is richly endowed witiv a vocabulary of primitives,and rule schemata. Exposure to the primary data will be filled in from the range of options allowed by universal grammar. It is argued that while it may initially appear that learners are using rules that are incorrect for analyzing the particular data, these rules actually fit into the larger aygtem the learners are acquiring. Ch,ildren's use:of motphological structural principles in agent noun acquisition was evaluatA0 in an experiment involving 21 chijdren between the ages of 3 and 7. The results were consistent with the hypothesis that children's grammars reflect morphological structural principles within a.framework which takes into.account the logic of learnability. (RW) ****************************************...
Proceedings of the Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium 2013
In US courtrooms, judges read jurors a set of “jury instructions” to help them reach a verdict. O... more In US courtrooms, judges read jurors a set of “jury instructions” to help them reach a verdict. One Massachusetts instruction concerns jurors’ memories: “Failure of recollection is common. Innocent misrecollection is not uncommon.” Since most jurors find this – and many instructions – nearly incomprehensible, a task force of judges, lawyers, and linguists has started a project for reform. The project began by testing how well a sample of instructions is understood. In one experiment, subjects heard six sample jury instructions and answered true/false questions about them. The results showed that comprehension varied with linguistic complexity, significantly worse on instructions containing passive verbs and presupposed information, factors known to increase processing load. A second experiment used Plain English versions that eliminated these factors, and comprehension improved significantly. The results suggest that though legal language is entrenched and reform is difficult, psycholinguistic research can help diagnose problems and suggest a course of action toward improving verdicts – and justice – overall.
The problem of how children retreat from overgeneralizations given that they do not get "negative... more The problem of how children retreat from overgeneralizations given that they do not get "negative" evidence that a certain construction they are producing is ungrammatical is a longstanding one. For example, the dative alternation, in which some verbs participate (give NP1 to NP2 ~ give NP2 NP1) is ungrammatical for other verbs (deliver NP1 to NP2 ~ *deliver NP2 NP1). This paper proposes how a learner can retreat from this and other overgeneralizations using only positive evidence combined with linguistic principles. The principles must be stated in the form of disjunctions: Either p or q, or equivalently, if p then not q. Once the learner finds evidence for p in the language, she knows that q cannot be present, and can eliminate it. The result is a kind of "Indirect" positive evidence, positive evidence that serves as the missing negative evidence.
Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction.- A Phenomenon and a Principle: The Isomorphi... more Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction.- A Phenomenon and a Principle: The Isomorphic Linking Hypothesis - Representations - The Competition - Advantages of this Proposal - Going Forward.- Part I A Geometric Theory of Linking - 1. Conceptual Structure - Motivating Conceptual Structure: A Review of the Problems with Theta Grids - Representing Arguments and Satisfying the Theta Criterion - Building Conceptual Structure Representations - Argument Fusion and Selection - Constraining Fusion: The Prohibition Against Double Fusion - Streamlining the Set of CS Primitives - Argument Structure: The Interface Projection from CS.- 2 Eliminating the Direct/Indirect Internal Argument Distinction - Reasons to Eliminate Indirect Arguments - Apparent Problems and Their Solutions - Syntactic Category - Linear Order - Lexical Rules - Summary .- 3. Explaining Linking Regularities - A New Linking Proposal: The Isomorphic Linking Hypothesis - Causative Verbs - Simple Causative Verbs - Produc...
You are a member of a jury. After the trial, the judge reads you and your fellow jurors a set of ... more You are a member of a jury. After the trial, the judge reads you and your fellow jurors a set of instructions. One of them begins: Failure of recollection is common. Innocent misrecollection is not uncommon… Confused? Now imagine that your native language is not English or that you never finished high school. Or both. Our justice system depends on jurors making informed decisions to reach a verdict, so when jury instructions are too challenging, jurors not only disengage but return misinformed verdicts. Courtroom practices make jurors’ jobs even harder. Many states don’t provide copies of the instructions and some don’t permit jurors to take notes. Can we make instructions easier for jurors, and in so doing, improve justice? In two studies, we show that jury instruction comprehension significantly improves (a) when subjects read the texts of the instructions while listening to them and (b) when the instructions are rewritten in Plain English, minimizing two linguistic factors: passi...
The creation of internet-based mega-corpora such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (... more The creation of internet-based mega-corpora such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) (Davies, 2011a) and the Google Ngram Viewer (Cohen, 2010) signals a new phase in corpus-based research that provides both novice and expert researchers immediate access to a variety of online texts and time-coded data. This paper explores the applications of these corpora in the analysis of academic word lists, in particular, Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL). Coxhead (2011) has called for further research on the AWL with larger corpora, noting that learners’ use of academic vocabulary needs to address for the AWL to be useful in various contexts. Results show that words on the AWL are declining in overall frequency from 1990 to the present. Implications about the AWL and future directions in corpus-based research utilizing mega-corpora are discussed. La creación de megacorpus basados en Internet, tales como el Corpus of Con...
This thesis investigates the system governing complex morphological forms in English and the way ... more This thesis investigates the system governing complex morphological forms in English and the way in which this system is acquired. Theories to account for constraints on the complementation of derived forms have been developed by Carlson and Roeper (1980) and Roeper (1981b ...
The 'problem of negative evidence' has emerged as one of the seminal concerns of resear... more The 'problem of negative evidence' has emerged as one of the seminal concerns of researchers interested in language acquisition and learnability in recent years. Briefly, the kinds of errors that arise in children's over-generalizations must be able to be corrected without ...
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