Distributional Information: A Powerful Cue for Acquiring Syntactic Categories

Abstract

Many theorists have dismissed a priori the idea that distributional information could play a significant role in syntactic category acquisition. We demonstrate empirically that such information provides a powerful cue to syntactic category membership, which can be exploited by a variety of simple, psychologically plausible mechanisms.We present a range of results using a large corpus of child-directed speech and explore their psychological implications. While our results show that a considerable amount of information concerning the syntactic categories can be obtained from distributional information alone, we stress that many other sources of information may also be potential contributors to the identification of syntactic classes.

Lexical exposure and word-form encoding in 1.5-year-olds.

“…Experimental studies show that 1-year-olds can form categories based on the phonological contexts of novel words (Gerken, Wilson, & Lewis, 2005;Höhle, Weissenborn, Kiefer, Schulz, & Schmitz, 2004). Analyses of transcribed infant-directed speech corpora (Mintz, Newport, & Bever, 2002;Redington, Chater, & Finch, 1998;Swingley, 2005b) suggest that these computational abilities could help inform infants about word properties like form class. Thus, there is reason to believe that young children's vocabulary knowledge is substantially underestimated by measures that count a word only when children seem to know what it means.…”

Simulating the cross-linguistic pattern of Optional Infinitive errors in children’s declaratives and Wh- questions

“…Several authors have shown that words with high overlap in terms of shared sentential contexts are likely to be of the same syntactic class (e.g. Redington, Chater & Finch, 1998;Mintz 2003).…”

Do as I say, not as I do: A lexical distributional account of English locative verb class acquisition

“…The difficulty of constraining verb class acquisition from situational information has motivated distributional accounts in which children learn verb classes from regularities in their linguistic input (Fisher, Gleitman & Gleitman, 1991;Gleitman, Cassidy, Nappa, Papafragou & Trueswell, 2005;Mintz, 2003;Mintz, Newport & Bever, 2002;Redington, Chater & Finch, 1998). One type of distributional learning is syntactic bootstrapping (Fisher, Gertner, Scott & Yuan, 2010;Gleitman, 1990;Landau & Gleitman, 1985), where verbstructure regularities are used to infer verb meaning.…”