SE367 Course ProjectShourya Sonkar Roy Burman

(Y8487)

Learning Grammatical Gender in an Artificial Language Based

on Hindi

IntroductionIs grammatical gender an arbitrarily defined

categorisation?Position: No, grammatical gender is acquired by

an individual based on two cues:Distributional Cues: Co-occurrence with gender

marked articles, verbs, adjective etc. in a certain manner

Phonological Cues: Similar sounding words are acquired as same gender

Objective of the study is to support this position using an artificial language constructed using Hindi syllables and Hindi sentence structures

Experiment Design

The Artificial LanguageDesign similar to that of Mirkovic J., Forrest S.

& Gaskell M. G. (2011)Based on Hindi pronounceable syllablesMasculine verbs: पातु and जीमु Feminine Verbs: वज and फोस Masculine Nouns: Words with 2-3 syllables,

which have no meaning in Hindi, as checked in Google Translate.

Feminine Nouns: Words with 2-3 syllables ending with �ू or ूो, which have no meaning in Hindi, as checked in Google Translate.

Mirkovic J., Forrest S. & Gaskell M. G. (2011). Semantic Regularities in Grammatical Categories: Learning Grammatical Gender in an Artificial Language. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society

The Artificial LanguageSentence constructions are [Noun] [verb] है!

कब� वज है!

The sentences were then recorded in the voice of a UP resident (Bimodal learning)

Modifications to the experiment suggested by Prof. Achla Raina, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

Schedule of Tasks

Day Task(s)

1 Word-picture Matching

2 Verb selectionWord-picture Matching

3Word-picture Matching

Word-picture Matching (on Generalisation set)

Verb selection

Participants: Five employees in the Hall 1 Mess

Examples of TasksSize of word-picture matching dataset: 44

Size of the generalisation set: 8

पातु/जीमु वज/फोस

Results

Word-Picture Matching (Day 1)

DiscussionThe participants are learning the artificial

nouns.The learning rates differed between

individuals.

Thank you!