Category induction from distributional cues in an artificial language

The ability to identify the grammatical category of a word (e.g., noun, verb, adjective) is a fundamental aspect of competence in a natural language. Children show evidence of categorization by as early as 18 months, and in some cases younger. However, the mechanisms that underlie this ability are n...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Memory & cognition 2002-07, Vol.30 (5), p.678-686
Main Author: MINTZ, Toben H
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Adults
Biological and medical sciences
Classification
Cognition & reasoning
Concept Formation
Cues
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Language
Linguistics
Male
Memory
Miscellaneous
Problem Solving
Psycholinguistics
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Semantics
Students - psychology
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Summary:The ability to identify the grammatical category of a word (e.g., noun, verb, adjective) is a fundamental aspect of competence in a natural language. Children show evidence of categorization by as early as 18 months, and in some cases younger. However, the mechanisms that underlie this ability are not well understood. The lexical co-occurrence patterns of words in sentences could provide information about word categories--for example, words that follow the in English often belong to the same category. As a step in understanding the role distributional mechanisms might play in language learning, the present study investigated the ability of adults to categorize words on the basis of distributional information. Forty participants listened for approximately 6 min to sentences in an artificial language and were told that they would later be tested on their memory for what they had heard. Participants were next tested on an additional set of sentences and asked to report which sentences they recognized from the first 6 min. The results suggested that learners performed a distributional analysis on the initial set of sentences and recognized sentences on the basis of their memory of sequences of categories of words. Thus, mechanisms that would be useful in natural language learning were shown to be active in adults in an artificial language learning task.
ISSN:0090-502X
1532-5946
DOI:10.3758/BF03196424