When Meaning Is Not Enough: Distributional and Semantic Cues to Word Categorization in Child Directed Speech.

ABSTRACT: One of the most important tasks in first language development is assigning words to their grammatical category. The Semantic Bootstrapping Hypothesis postulates that, in order to accomplish this task, children are guided by a neat correspondence between semantic and grammatical categories, since nouns typically refer to objects and verbs to actions. It is this correspondence that guides children's initial word categorization. Other approaches, on the other hand, suggest that children might make use of distributional cues and word contexts to accomplish the word categorization task. According to such approaches, the Semantic Bootstrapping assumption offers an important limitation, as it might not be true that all the nouns that children hear refer to specific objects or people

SUBMITTER: Feijoo S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5516671 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature