We regularly make predictions about future events, even in a world where events occur probabilistically rather than deterministically. Our environment may even be non-stationary such that the probability of an event may change suddenly or from one context to another. 4-6 year olds and adults viewed 3 boxes and guessed the location of a hidden toy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere has been significant recent interest in clarifying how learners use distributional information during language acquisition. Many researchers have suggested that distributional learning mechanisms play a major role during grammatical category acquisition, since linguistic form-classes (like and ) and subclasses (like and grammatical gender) are primarily defined by the ways lexical items are distributed in syntactic contexts. Though recent experimental work has affirmed the importance of distributional information for category acquisition, there has been little evidence that learners can acquire linguistic based only on distributional cues.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSuccessful language acquisition hinges on organizing individual words into grammatical categories and learning the relationships between them, but the method by which children accomplish this task has been debated in the literature. One proposal is that learners use the shared distributional contexts in which words appear as a cue to their underlying category structure. Indeed, recent research using artificial languages has demonstrated that learners can acquire grammatical categories from this type of distributional information.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA fundamental component of language acquisition involves organizing words into grammatical categories. Previous literature has suggested a number of ways in which this categorization task might be accomplished. Here we ask whether the patterning of the words in a corpus of linguistic input (distributional information) is sufficient, along with a small set of learning biases, to extract these underlying structural categories.
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