The distributional structure of grammatical categories in speech to young children
The distributional structure of grammatical categories in speech to young children
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DOI：
10.1207/s15516709cog2604_1
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发表时间：
2002-07-01
影响因子：
2.5
通讯作者：
Bever, TG
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Mintz, TH;Newport, EL;Bever, TG
我们对幼儿的语言输入进行了一系列的三次分析，以确定它可能为语法类别学习过程提供的分布信息。每次分析都是在CHILDES数据库（MacWhinney, 2000）中针对2岁以下儿童的四个独立语料库上进行的；我们表明，与其他研究结果一致，基于单词与周围单词的共现模式对单词进行分类的分布分析成功地对大多数名词和动词进行了分类。在分析2和3中，我们试图通过采用更现实的假设，使我们的分析与自然语言习得更密切相关，即幼儿如何表示他们的输入。在分析2中，我们通过施加短语结构边界来限制分布上下文，并发现分类甚至比从较少限制的上下文中获得的分类更好。在分析3中，我们减少了幼儿可能没有完全处理的输入元素的表示，我们发现分类没有受到不利影响：虽然名词分类比分析1和2中差，但仍然很好；动词的分类能力也会提高。总的来说，所有分析都保持了名词和动词的成功分类。这些结果为涉及分布分析的语法类别形成理论提供了有希望的支持，只要这些分析与儿童学习者的计算偏见和能力的适当假设相结合。(C) 2002认知科学学会版权所有。
We present a series of three analyses of young children's linguistic input to determine the distributional information it could plausibly offer to the process of grammatical category learning. Each analysis was conducted on four separate corpora from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000) of speech directed to children under 2;5. We show that, in accord with other findings, a distributional analysis which categorizes words based on their co-occurrence patterns with surrounding words successfully categorizes the majority of nouns and verbs. In Analyses 2 and 3, we attempt to make our analyses more closely relevant to natural language acquisition by adopting more realistic assumptions about how young children represent their input. In Analysis 2, we limit the distributional context by imposing phrase structure boundaries, and find that categorization improves even beyond that obtained from less limited contexts. In Analysis 3, we reduce the representation of input elements which young children might not fully process and we find that categorization is not adversely affected: Although noun categorization is worse than in Analyses 1 and 2, it is still good; and verb categorization actually improves. Overall, successful categorization of nouns and verbs is maintained across all analyses. These results provide promising support for theories of grammatical category formation involving distributional analysis, as long as these analyses are combined with appropriate assumptions about the child learner's computational biases and capabilities. (C) 2002 Cognitive Science Society, Inc. All rights reserved.