Sequence structure in children's speech reveals non-linear development of relations between word categories.

ABSTRACT: Why do children learn some words earlier than others? Can children's speech patterns reveal how their evolving models of language determine what they learn? This study presents a systemic analysis of children's speech using low-dimensional embeddings to examine how the contextual knowledge reflected in their utterances reorganizes as linguistic experience increases. We analyzed age-stratified samples from the CHILDES database (18-36 months: n = 1,693,641 tokens; 3-6 years: n = 1,750,007; 5-12 years: n = 1,721,828) and adult speech from the SUBS2VEC subtitle corpus (n = 1,742,885). Our results suggest that the order and position of words in sequences produced by children from different age groups reflect changes in the way they represent categories of words. Rather than being ungrammatical,

SUBMITTER: Linke M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12847997 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature