Restrictions of frequent frames as cues to categories: the case of Dutch

Why Dutch 12-month-old infants do not use frequent frames in early categorization

Mintz (2003) proposes that very local distributional contexts of words in the input-so-called 'frequent frames'-function as reliable cues for categories corresponding to the adult verb and noun. He shows that categories resulting from frequent frames align with English grammatical categories for over 90% and that American 12-month-olds use these frequent
frames to form a verbal category. Based on Dutch input and child data, I will show that frequent frames are not generally valid as a cue to categories.
In a replication of Mintz (2003) for the input to Dutch children, I found that the frame-based categories aligned with Dutch grammatical categories for only 40%-71%. Furthermore, Dutch 12-month-olds did not use these cues in an experiment designed parallel to Mintz (2006). Even Dutch 16-montholds did not use the cues, although there was some development towards the English pattern between the two age groups.