How does a child map words to grammatical categories when words are not overtly marked either lexically or prosodically? Recent language acquisition theories have proposed that distributional information encoded in sequences of words or morphemes might play a central role in forming grammatical classes. To test this proposal, we analyze child-directed speech from seven typologically diverse languages to simulate maximum variation in the structures of the world's languages. We ask whether the input to children contains cues for assigning syntactic categories in frequent frames, which are frequently occurring nonadjacent sequences of words or morphemes. In accord with aggregated results from previous studies on individual languages, we find that frequent word frames do not provide a robust distributional pattern for accurately predicting grammatical categories. However, our results show that frames are extremely accurate cues cross-linguistically at the morpheme level. We theorize that the nonadjacent dependency pattern captured by frequent frames is a universal anchor point for learners on the morphological level to detect and categorize grammatical categories. Whether frames also play a role on higher linguistic levels such as words is determined by grammatical features of the individual language.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
|---|---|
| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5894936 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.02.005 | DOI Listing |
Publication Analysis
Top Keywords
Similar Publications
Two types of motifs enhance human recall and generalization of long sequences.
Commun Psychol
January 2025
Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI, Münich, Germany.
Whether it is listening to a piece of music, learning a new language, or solving a mathematical equation, people often acquire abstract notions in the sense of motifs and variables-manifested in musical themes, grammatical categories, or mathematical symbols. How do we create abstract representations of sequences? Are these abstract representations useful for memory recall? In addition to learning transition probabilities, chunking, and tracking ordinal positions, we propose that humans also use abstractions to arrive at efficient representations of sequences. We propose and study two abstraction categories: projectional motifs and variable motifs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSequence order resolves ambiguity in a nonlinguistic visual categorization task.
Atten Percept Psychophys
December 2024
Department of Psychology, Emory University, 36 Eagle Row, Atlanta, GA, 30322, USA.
When we encounter an unfamiliar word in a sentence, word order can be used to determine the grammatical category to which that word belongs and clarify ambiguity. However, it is unclear whether a similar categorization effect occurs in nonlinguistic contexts. We created three perceptually distinct categories of shape stimuli-rounded (A); squared (B); pointed (C).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFollow the eyes: gaze and grammaticality.
Front Psychol
November 2024
Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest, Hungary.
This paper studies the role of eye tracking in detecting grammatical violation in reading tasks. It tests the assumption that encountering syntactic violation has its correspondence in the behavioral patterns associated with gazing. Applying the offered by the research environment , it is shown that the observation of grammaticality/agrammaticality in samples of experiments is reflected in the partial correlation of these categories across a number of structural patterns.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBuilding a Grammatical Network: Form and Function in the Development of Hebrew Prepositions.
Lang Speech
November 2024
Tel Aviv University, Israel.
This study investigates the emergence of prepositions in Hebrew-speaking children aged 2;6-6;0 years, analyzing a peer talk corpus of 75 children across five age groups. Across 45-minute triadic conversations, we examined the distributions, semantic functions, and form-function relations of prepositions. Two results sections are presented.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUsing computational modeling to validate the onset of productive determiner-noun combinations in English-learning children.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
December 2024
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637.
Article Synopsis
- Language is a productive system, allowing children to create new utterances they've never heard before, making it tricky to determine when they first demonstrate linguistic productivity.
- Researchers conducted a study with 64 English-learning children, examining when they started to combine determiners and nouns in ways not seen in their caregivers' speech.
- By combining behavioral data and computational modeling, they found that the children were generating unique combinations similar to the model, indicating that they too were creatively using language beyond their prior experiences.
Want AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?
Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!