From shared contexts to syntactic categories: the role of distributional information in learning linguistic form-classes.

ABSTRACT: A fundamental component of language acquisition involves organizing words into grammatical categories. Previous literature has suggested a number of ways in which this categorization task might be accomplished. Here we ask whether the patterning of the words in a corpus of linguistic input (distributional information) is sufficient, along with a small set of learning biases, to extract these underlying structural categories. In a series of experiments, we show that learners can acquire linguistic form-classes, generalizing from instances of the distributional contexts of individual words in the exposure set to the full range of contexts for all the words in the set. Crucially, we explore how several specific distributional variables enable learners to form a category of lexical items and g

SUBMITTER: Reeder PA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3621024 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature