Learning grammatical categories from distributional cues: Flexible frames for language acquisition

St Clair, Michelle C. and Monaghan, Padraic and Christiansen, Morten H. (2010) Learning grammatical categories from distributional cues: Flexible frames for language acquisition. Cognition, 116 (3). pp. 341-360. ISSN 0010-0277

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Abstract

Numerous distributional cues in the child's environment may potentially assist in language learning, but what cues are useful to the child and when are these cues utilised? We propose that the most useful source of distributional cue is a flexible frame surrounding the word, where the language learner integrates information from the preceding and the succeeding word for grammatical categorisation. In corpus analyses of child-directed speech together with computational models of category acquisition, we show that these flexible frames are computationally advantageous for language learning, as they benefit from the coverage of bigram information across a large proportion of the language environment as well as exploiting the enhanced accuracy of trigram information. Flexible frames are also consistent with the developmental trajectory of children's sensitivity to different sources of distributional information, and they are therefore a useful and useable information source for supporting the acquisition of grammatical categories. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
Cognition
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/core/keywords/psychology
Subjects:
?? language acquisitiongrammatical categorisationdistributional informationcorpus analysiscomputational modellingword segmentationdirected speechphonologystressgermanpsychologylinguistics and languagecognitive neuroscienceexperimental and cognitive psycholog ??
ID Code:
52744
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
23 Feb 2012 12:57
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
15 Jul 2024 12:39