The Acquisition of Grammatical Categories by Infants

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Grammatical categories like noun and verb are the building blocks of structure in language, controlling the way in which words are ordered, rearranged, and modified. Hence, in order to learn how a particular language is structured, a child must first determine how the categories are structured: what are the nouns, the verbs, are there adjectives, etc. Recent research by the Principal Investigator has shown that children can use patterns in the linear order of words to draw conclusions about categories (e.g., words following the word ''you'' and preceding the word ''it'' are often verbs in English). However, many critical questions remain. For instance, there are many kinds of patterns that potentially could be used to classify words; it is not known which particular patterns infants attend to and use to form categories. Nor is it known whether categories in languages that are structurally very different from English could be learned in similar ways. Consequently, it is not yet understood precisely what kinds of learning mechanisms infants have at their disposal, and what kinds of computations they carry out to categorize words. This project addresses these issues in a series of experiments with adults and infants, using both real and artificial languages, to investigate how very young children categorize words. Concurrently, the project undertakes computational analyses of languages that are very different from English in how their word-order properties. This project addresses crucial questions about the learning processes and representations involved in fundamental aspects of language learning in children. Understanding how children initially categorize words is crucial to understanding how they acquire the syntax of their language, and how they learn word meanings. The answers to these questions could have a significant theoretical impact on the field of language acquisition and will potentially inform theories on developmental language disabilities, and second language acquisition in adults.