Children's grammars grow more abstract with age - Evidence from an automatic procedure for identifying the productive units of language

Open Access
Authors
Publication date 2008
Host editors
  • B.C. Love
  • K. McRae
  • V.M. Sloutsky
Book title Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society
ISBN
  • 9780976831846
Event 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2008), Washington, DC, USA
Pages (from-to) 47-52
Publisher Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society
Organisations
  • Interfacultary Research - Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC)
Abstract We develop an approach to automatically identify the most probable multi-word constructions used in children's utterances, given syntactically annotated utterances from the Brown corpus of CHILDES. The found constructions cover many interesting linguistic phenomena from the language acquisition literature, and show a progression from very concrete towards abstract constructions. We show quantitatively that for all children of the Brown corpus grammatical abstraction, defined as the relative number of variable slots in the productive units of their grammar, increases globally with age.
Document type Conference contribution
Language English
Published at http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/CSJarchive/proceedings/2008/pdfs/p47.pdf
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