Children's Grammars Grow More Abstract with Age - Evidence from an Automatic Procedure for Identifying the Productive Units of Language

We develop an approach to automatically identify the most probable multiword constructions used in children's utterances, given syntactically annotated utterances from the Brown corpus of CHILDES. The found constructions cover many interesting linguistic phenomena from the language acquisition literature and show a progression from very concrete toward abstract constructions. We show quantitatively that for all children of the Brown corpus grammatical abstraction, defined as the relative number of variable slots in the productive units of their grammar, increases globally with age.

[1]  A. Goldberg.  Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language , 2006 .

[2]  Margaret Thomas,et al.  Generative perspectives on language acquisition (review) , 1999 .

[3]  Khalil Sima'an,et al.  A memory-based model of syntactic analysis: data-oriented parsing , 1999, J. Exp. Theor. Artif. Intell..

[4]  Alon Lavie,et al.  High-accuracy Annotation and Parsing of CHILDES Transcripts , 2007 .

[5]  M. Tomasello.  Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition , 2003 .

[6]  B. MacWhinney.  The CHILDES project: tools for analyzing talk , 1992 .

[7]  Stephen Crain,et al.  Acquisition of Syntax and Semantics , 2006 .

[8]  Rens Bod.  An efficient implementation of a new DOP model , 2003, EACL.

[9]  Fei Xia,et al.  Converting Dependency Structures to Phrase Structures , 2001, HLT.

[10]  Rens Bod,et al.  Beyond Grammar: An Experience-Based Theory of Language , 1998 .

[11]  Michael J Cortese,et al.  Handbook of Psycholinguistics , 2011 .

[12]  Noam Chomsky,et al.  वाक्यविन्यास का सैद्धान्तिक पक्ष = Aspects of the theory of syntax , 1965 .

[13]  Ann M. Peters,et al.  The Units of Language Acquisition , 1983 .

[14]  Willem H. Zuidema.  What are the Productive Units of Natural Language Grammar? A DOP Approach to the Automatic Identification of Constructions. , 2006, CoNLL.

[15]  Adele E. Goldberg,et al.  Constructions at Work , 2005 .

[16]  Aravind K. Joshi,et al.  Starting with complex primitives pays off: complicate locally, simplify globally , 2004, Cogn. Sci..

[17]  A. Goldberg.  The nature of generalization in language , 2009 .

[18]  M. Tomasello,et al.  Early syntactic creativity: a usage-based approach. , 2003, Journal of child language.

[19]  Willem H. Zuidema.  Parsimonious Data-Oriented Parsing , 2007, EMNLP-CoNLL.

[20]  R. Brown,et al.  A First Language , 1973 .

[21]  Steven Pinker,et al.  Language learnability and language development , 1985 .

[22]  R. Horton.  Rules and representations , 1993, The Lancet.

[23]  Harald Clahsen,et al.  Generative perspectives on language acquisition : empirical findings, theoretical considerations, and crosslinguistic comparisons , 1996 .

[24]  M. Tomasello.  The item-based nature of children’s early syntactic development , 2000, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[25]  Adam Hodges,et al.  A Corpus Study on the Item-based Nature of Early Grammar Acquisition. , 2004 .