Descriptive analysis of the acquisition of the base form, third person singular, present participle regular past, irregular past, and past participle in a supervised artificial neural network and an unsupervised artificial neural network

Abstract

Studying children’s language acquisition in natural settings is not cost and time effective. Therefore, language acquisition may be studied in an artificial setting reducing the costs related to this type of research. By artificial, I do not mean that children will be placed in an artificial setting, first because this would not be ethical and second because the problem of the time needed for this research would still be present. Thus, by artificial I mean that the tools of simulation found in artificial intelligence can be used. Simulators as artificial neural networks (ANNs) possess the capacity to simulate different human cognitive skills, as pattern or speech recognition, and can also be implemented in personal computers with software such as MATLAB, a numerical computing software. ANNs are computer simulation models that try to resemble the neural processes behind several human cognitive skills. There are two main types of ANNs: supervised and unsupervised. The learning processes in the first are guided by the computer programmer, while the learning processes of the latter are random.