A universal cue for grammatical categories in the input to children: Frequent frames.

ABSTRACT: How does a child map words to grammatical categories when words are not overtly marked either lexically or prosodically? Recent language acquisition theories have proposed that distributional information encoded in sequences of words or morphemes might play a central role in forming grammatical classes. To test this proposal, we analyze child-directed speech from seven typologically diverse languages to simulate maximum variation in the structures of the world's languages. We ask whether the input to children contains cues for assigning syntactic categories in frequent frames, which are frequently occurring nonadjacent sequences of words or morphemes. In accord with aggregated results from previous studies on individual languages, we find that frequent word frames do not provide a robust d

SUBMITTER: Moran S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5894936 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature