Exploring the acquisition of verb inflections in Japanese: A probabilistic analysis of seven adult–child corpora

Abstract

The acquisition of verb morphology is often studied using categorical criteria for determining the productivity of a morpheme. Applying this approach to Japanese, an agglutinative language, this study finds no consistent order for morpheme acquisition and that productivity could be explained by sampling effects. To examine morpheme acquisition using more graded measures of productivity, the authors compared various regression models for predicting the age of acquisition of 311 verb forms across a large combined corpus of seven Japanese-speaking children (aged 1;1–5;1). Complex forms were learned earlier than frequency-matched simple forms, and morpheme ending identity explained substantial variation. Both of these findings suggest that children have some segmented morphemes and have learned some of their semantic/pragmatic characteristics. Sampling would predict that verb form acquisition would be sensitive to lemma and ending frequency, but acquisition was also sensitive to aspects of input frequency that were independent of these factors, and this suggests that children are encoding whole verb forms in addition to creating forms with compositional morphological rules.

Visual Heuristics for Verb Production: Testing a Deep‐Learning Model With Experiments in Japanese

“…For example, children used hipparu (pull and stretch) only in the progressive form, while taosu (knock over) was only used in the past. So, even though these are young children, they appear to be sensitive to the association between verbs and past/progressive forms as has been found in corpora studies (Shirai & Andersen, 1995;Tatsumi, Chang, & Pine, 2021;Tatsumi & Pine, 2016).…”

Analysing the variation of metadiscourse verb patterns in English academic papers from within and between disciplines

“…At present, this method works best in the field of text similarity calculation. In this method, the n-dimensional vectors of all words are first obtained through the word2vec model, then the Euclidean distance between words is calculated and the word frequency of words in the article is calculated [31]. The calculation problem of the distance between sentences can be transformed as follows: how to convert all the word units carried by sentence A into the corresponding word units of sentence B at the minimum cost so as to transform the problem into a transportation optimisation problem, which can be solved by a transportation optimisation algorithm.…”

Acquiring Polish noun inflection: Two children’s productivity and error patterns in relation to parental input

“…Although some studies investigating the acquisition of morphology have used children's caregiver speech as a more representative indicator of actual input (e.g. Kirjavainen et al, 2009;Tatsumi et al, 2021), the present study is one of a relative few which have carried out an equalised like-for-like analysis of child-versus-caregiver inflectional productivity (Aguado-Orea & Pine, 2015;Krajewski et al, 2012). The aim of this study is to contribute to the body of evidence for input-based learning of inflectional morphology with a direct analysis of two siblings' speech in relation to that of their parents.…”

“…Although some studies investigating the acquisition of morphology have used children’s caregiver speech as a more representative indicator of actual input (e.g. Kirjavainen et al, 2009; Tatsumi et al, 2021), the present study is one of a relative few which have carried out an equalised like-for-like analysis of child-versus-caregiver inflectional productivity (Aguado-Orea & Pine, 2015; Krajewski et al, 2012).…”