Researchers studying word learning have discovered that the syntactic frame in which a word appears plays an important role in the interpretation of the word, and this importance diminishes gradually with the increase in age. These phenomena are known as frame and verb compliance. Here, a connectionist model is presented that learns a miniature language by associating sentences with the corresponding "scenes." In doing so, the network exhibits the shift from frame to verb compliance. It is argued that these phenomena can be attributed to the increasing linguistic experience and representations that change with learning, and it is not necessary to invoke specialized mechanisms or principles.
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