The effect of sampling on estimates of lexical specificity and error rates

Abstract

A B S T R A C TStudies based on naturalistic data are a core tool in the field of language acquisition research and have provided thorough descriptions of children's speech. However, these descriptions are inevitably confounded by differences in the relative frequency with which children use words and language structures. The purpose of the present work was to investigate the impact of sampling constraints on estimates of the productivity of children's utterances, and on the validity of error rates. Comparisons were made between five different sized samples of wh-question data produced by one child aged 2 ;8. First, we assessed whether sampling constraints undermined the claim (e.g. Tomasello, 2000) that the restricted nature of early child speech reflects a lack of adultlike grammatical knowledge. We demonstrated that small samples were equally likely to under-as overestimate lexical specificity in children's speech, and that the reliability of estimates varies according to sample size. We argued that reliable analyses require a comparison with a control sample, such as that from an adult speaker. Second, we investigated the validity of estimates of error rates based on small samples. The results showed that overall error rates underestimate the incidence of error in some rarely produced parts of the system and that analyses on small samples were likely to substantially over-or underestimate error rates in infrequently produced constructions. We concluded that caution must be used when basing arguments about the scope and nature of errors in children's early multi-word productions on analyses of samples of spontaneous speech.

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

“…In contrast to these smaller studies, we examine the behaviour of a wide range of locative verbs in the 14 UK English corpora in the CHILDES child language database (MacWhinney, 2000). We extracted all utterances in the UK corpora in CHILDES (Cruttenden, 1978;Fletcher & Garman, 1998;Forrester, 2002;Gathercole, 1986;Henry, 1995;Howe, 1981;Johnson, 1986;Korman, 1992;Lieven, Salomo, & Tomasello, 2009;Rowland & Fletcher, 2006;Theakston, Lieven, Pine & Rowland, 2001;Tommerdahl, 2009;Wells, 1981;Wilson & Henry, 1998;Wooten, 1984) for the 140 locative verbs for which Ambridge et al (2012) collected grammaticality ratings. We created the full corpus of 38,231 utterances by searching for all possible forms of each of the 140 locative verbs (e.g., stick, sticking, stuck), and found tokens of 103 forms (see Appendix A for details).…”

The Acquisition of Auxiliary Syntax: A Longitudinal Elicitation Study. Part 2: The Modals and Auxiliary DO

“…This means that we require longitudinal data to establish more precisely the pattern of acquisition and to test their predictions. Although a number of longitudinal studies of naturalistic data have been carried out (e.g., Fletcher, 1985;Richards, 1990;Stromswold, 1990;, these often fail to capture many of the errors children produce because of sampling restrictions or limitations on the age range of the children studied and may miss errors with low-frequency items (Rowland & Fletcher, 2005;Tomasello & Stahl, 2004).…”

On the Distribution and Acquisition of the West Germanic ‘Need’-Verbs: German between Dutch and English

“…Note that for the English files, a total number of recording hours was not available due to a lack of corpus information. (Forrester 2002), Howe (Howe 1981), Lara (Rowland & Fletcher 2006), Manchester (Theakston et al 2001), Thomas-Heritage (Lieven et al 2009), and Wells (Wells 1981). 4 Relevant data were collected from the child-directed speech of the following subcorpora in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney 2009): Caroline (these data were used with the permission of the Language Archive (MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen)), Leo (Behrens 2006), Miller (Miller 1979), Szagun (Szagun 2001), Rigol (Rigol 2007), and Wagner (Wagner 1985).…”