Productivity depends on communicative intention and accessibility, not thresholds

Alexia Hernandez, Sammy Floyd, Adele E. Goldberg

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

When do children extend a construction (“rule”) productively? A recent Threshold proposal claims that a construction is productive if and only if it has been witnessed applying to a sufficient proportion of cases and sufficiently few exceptions. An alternative proposal, Communicate and Access (C&A), argues that children extend a construction productively because they wish to express an intended message and are unable to access a “better” (appropriate and more conventional) way to do so. Accessibility, in turn, is negatively affected by interference from competing alternatives. In a preregistered experiment, 32 4-6-year-old children were provided with exposure to 2 mini-artificial languages for which the two proposals make opposite predictions. Results support the C&A proposal: children were more productive after witnessing 3 rule-following cases than after 5, due to differences in interference. We conclude that productivity is encouraged by a desire to communicate a message and is constrained by accessibility and interference.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
Subtitle of host publicationCreativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019
PublisherThe Cognitive Science Society
Pages428-434
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)0991196775, 9780991196777
StatePublished - 2019
Event41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019 - Montreal, Canada
Duration: Jul 24 2019Jul 27 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019

Conference

Conference41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityMontreal
Period7/24/197/27/19

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Cognitive Neuroscience

Keywords

  • accessibility
  • communication
  • productivity
  • Sufficiency Principle
  • Tolerance Principle

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