Many systems, one strategy: Acquiring ordinals in Dutch and English

What it is about

The paper asks whether children learn ordinal numbers (second, third, vierde) by a rule or item by item. Two "Give-N" comprehension tasks are run. Seventy Dutch children (aged 2;08 to 4;11) are tested on synthetic ordinals (vierde), analytic ordinals (auto vier, "car four") and an irregular form (derde "third"); 35 American English children (aged 3;3 to 5;3) do the same test with English forms. The results point to a rule. Children who know the cardinal principle (CP-knowers) find regular ordinals more easily than irregular ones in both languages, and analytic forms are no harder than synthetic ones. English regular ordinals are answered correctly about 60% of the time, while second, third and fifth are below 50%. The authors apply Yang's Tolerance Principle: with five ordinals and three exceptions, the English rule is still productive (the threshold for N = 5 is 3.1). English learners answer less accurately than Dutch learners overall, and the authors attribute this to the greater number of exceptions. Ordinals are learned differently from cardinals, which follow a slower, item-by-item pattern.

Ideas

• I1. Implement the Tolerance Principle as a gate in en/src/morph.rs: for each candidate suffix over N lexical items, count exceptions e and adopt the rule if e is at most N divided by ln N. Output the N, e, threshold and the decision, with BTreeMap order over the candidates.
• I2. Check the gate on the English ordinals: for growing N, count the exceptions to -th among the first N ordinals (first, second, third, fifth, and spelling changes such as ninth, twelfth) and report the smallest N at which the gate adopts -th. Compare that point with the paper's acquisition findings for English.
• I3. Regularity as a feature of the ordinal lookup: mark each ordinal as regular or irregular, and report the accuracy of the ordinal analysis on each class separately. The paper predicts regular > irregular and no difference between analytic and synthetic forms, so that is the expected pattern.
• I4. Negative control: a suffix whose exceptions dominate (the English strong past forms) must be rejected by the gate. If the gate adopts it, the threshold is wrong.

For Mova

The chapters are 12. Pronouns, determiners and numerals (cardinals, ordinals and superlatives such as first), 17. Derivation II: suffixes (productive suffixes such as -th) and 14. Irregular verbs (exceptions to a productive rule). The code is en/src/morph.rs (inflection and derivation rules), with the Tolerance gate as a small addition there, and en/src/dict.rs (the ordinal entries). The measures: the gate's decision and counts on the English ordinal list (run twice to confirm identical output), and the ordinal analysis accuracy by regularity class, compared with the paper's pattern.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.595

@article{meyer2020many,
  title = {{Many systems, one strategy: Acquiring ordinals in Dutch and English}},
  author = {Meyer, Caitlin and Barbiers, Sjef and Weerman, Fred},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.595},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.595}
}

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37. How to cite this article: Meyer, Caitlin, Sjef Barbiers and Fred Weerman. 2020. Many systems, one strategy: Acquiring ordinals in Dutch and English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 5(1): 100. 1–31. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/ gjgl.595 ↗ our card
38. Submitted: 19 December 2017 find
39. Accepted: 02 January 2020 find
40. Published: 12 October 2020 find
41. Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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