Emergence of Grammatical Constructions: Evidence from Simulation and Grounded Agent Experiments Author:

Constructions Nouns and Verbs 2 Table 2. Simulation results. With no open class elements, the holophrase simulations yeild one construction per sentence. When nouns become “variables” in the verb islands, the sentences can be represented by 4 distinct constructions. When nouns and verbs are open class variables, the set of sentences can be representd by the two transitive and di-transitive constructions. In the second simulation of the "verb island" phase, the input was processed as in the holophrase condition, with the exception that nouns no longer contributed directly to the ConstructionIndex. Instead, their status as open class words and their relative sentence positions were encoded in the ConstructionIndex as in the simulations described in previous sections.