Infants can use distributional cues to form syntactic categories

Nearly all theories of language development emphasize the importance of distributional cues for segregating words and phrases into syntactic categories like noun, feminine or verb phrase. However, questions concerning whether such cues can be used to the exclusion of referential cues have been debat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of child language 2005-05, Vol.32 (2), p.249-268
Main Authors: GERKEN, LOUANN, WILSON, RACHEL, LEWIS, WILLIAM
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biological and medical sciences
Child development
Child Language
Children & youth
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive categorization
Cues
Debates
Developmental psychology
Experiments
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Gender
Grammar
Grammatical gender
Humans
Hypotheses
Infant
Infants
Language
Language Acquisition
Learning Processes
Linguistics
Male
Native language acquisition
Newborn. Infant
Phonology
Predicate
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Russian language
Semantics
Studies
Syntax
Verbal Behavior
Verbal cues
Verbal Learning
Verbs
Young Children
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Summary:Nearly all theories of language development emphasize the importance of distributional cues for segregating words and phrases into syntactic categories like noun, feminine or verb phrase. However, questions concerning whether such cues can be used to the exclusion of referential cues have been debated. Using the headturn preference procedure, American children aged 1;5 were briefly familiarized with a partial Russian gender paradigm, with a subset of the paradigm members withheld. During test, infants listened on alternate trials to previously withheld grammatical items and ungrammatical items with incorrect gender markings on previously heard stems. Across three experiments, infants discriminated new grammatical from ungrammatical items, but like adults in previous studies, were only able to do so when a subset of familiarization items was double marked for gender category. The results suggest that learners can use distributional cues to category structure, to the exclusion of referential cues, from relatively early in the language learning process.
ISSN:0305-0009
1469-7602
DOI:10.1017/S0305000904006786