When learning language young children are faced with many seemingly formidable challenges, including discovering words embedded in a continuous stream of sounds and determining what role these words play in syntactic constructions. We suggest that knowledge of phoneme distributions may play a crucial part in helping children segment words and determine their lexical category, and propose an integrated model of how children might go from unsegmented speech to lexical categories. We corroborated this theoretical model using a two-stage computational analysis of a large corpus of English child-directed speech. First, we used transition probabilities between phonemes to find words in unsegmented speech. Second, we used distributional information about word edges—the beginning and ending phonemes of words—to predict whether the segmented words from the first stage were nouns, verbs, or something else. The results indicate that discovering lexical units and their associated syntactic category in child-directed speech is possible by attending to the statistics of single phoneme transitions and word-initial and final phonemes. Thus, we suggest that a core computational principle in language acquisition is that the same source of information is used to learn about different aspects of linguistic structure.
In this work, a novel method of cocitation analysis, coined "contextual cocitation analysis," is introduced and described in comparison to traditional methods of cocitation analysis. Equations for quantifying contextual cocitation strength are introduced and their implications explored using theoretical examples alongside the application of contextual cocitation to a series of BioMed Central publications and their cited resources. Based on this work, the implications of contextual cocitation for understanding the granularity of the relationships created between cited published research and methods for its analysis are discussed. Future applications and improvements of this work, including its extended application to the published research of multiple disciplines, are then presented with rationales for their inclusion.
Recent research has shown that 2-year-olds fail at a task that ostensibly only requires the ability to understand that solid objects cannot pass through other solid objects. Two experiments were conducted in which 2- and 3-year-olds judged the stopping point of an object as it moved at varying speeds along a path and behind an occluder, stopping at a barrier visible above the occluder. Three-year-olds were able to take into account the barrier when searching for the object, while 2-year-olds were not. However, both groups judged faster moving objects to travel farther as indicated by their incorrect reaches. Thus, the results show that young children's sensori-motor representations exhibit a form of representational momentum. This unifies the perceptually based representations of early childhood with adults' dynamic representations that incorporate physical regularities but that are also available to conscious reasoning.
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