The Learnability of the Wh-Island Constraint in Dutch by a Long Short-Term Memory Network

The current study investigates whether a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network can learn the wh-island constraint in Dutch in a way comparable to human native speakers. After establishing with an acceptability judgement task that native speakers demonstrate a clear sensitivity to wh-island violations, the LSTM network was tested on the same sentences. Contrary to the results of the native speakers, the network was not able to recognize wh-islands and to block gap expectancies within them. This suggests that input and the network’s inductive biases alone might not be enough to learn about synta... Mehr ...