Morphosyntactic cues to noun categorization in English child-directed speech

Abstract

a b s t r a c tMainstream research in Linguistics claims that grammatical regularities are scarcely represented in the linguistic input to which children are exposed. However, recent empirical research shows that child-directed speech contains a series of reliable cues that might assist young language learners in language development. The present study aims at testing whether English child-directed speech contains morphosyntactic regularities which might be robust enough for infants to group nouns in their grammatical category. The results from the study show that, in fact, the kind of input available to English-learning infants contains reliable and consistent distributional cues to account for most of the nouns to which children are exposed.

Lexical category acquisition is facilitated by uncertainty in distributional co-occurrences

“…Many computational simulations and corpus studies [8–23] as well as behavioral studies [24–32] have corroborated the distributional bootstrapping hypothesis. Moreover, this learning strategy has proven effective for several languages other than English, including French [33], Dutch [34], Spanish [35], German [36, 37], Turkish [37], Chinese [38], and several other typologically diverse languages [39].…”

When Meaning Is Not Enough: Distributional and Semantic Cues to Word Categorization in Child Directed Speech

“…Furthermore, higher scores of correct noun classification as well as correct non-noun classification are also obtained with the combination of distributional and semantic cues than with distributional cues alone (Feijoo et al, 2015). …”

“…The same semantic cues that were used in Study 1 were also used in Study 2. Regarding distributional cues, following previous studies ( Mintz, 2003 ; Monaghan et al, 2007 ; Feijoo et al, 2015 ), for the present analysis we only considered the set of syntactic contexts which included extremely local grammatical relationships of the type Determiner + Noun (i.e., English articles, demonstrative determiners, possessive determiners, and quantifiers preceding nouns).…”

“…Such distributional information appears to be available not only to adult speakers but also to young language learners as well (Mintz, 2003; Monaghan et al, 2007; Feijoo et al, 2015). …”

“…Studies on computer simulations have provided evidence for the usefulness of distributional and positional information for an initial categorization of words in the absence of semantic or referential information ( Cartwright and Brent, 1997 ; Redington et al, 1998 ). Such distributional information appears to be available not only to adult speakers but also to young language learners as well ( Mintz, 2003 ; Monaghan et al, 2007 ; Feijoo et al, 2015 ).…”