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Distributional learning aids linguistic category formation in school-age children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2017

Jessica HALL ,
Amanda OWEN VAN HORNE  and
Thomas FARMER
Jessica HALL*
Affiliation:
University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, USA
Amanda OWEN VAN HORNE
Affiliation:
University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, USA
Thomas FARMER
Affiliation:
University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Jessica Hall, Communication Sciences & Disorders, University of Iowa, 250 Hawkins IA, Iowa City, Iowa 52240, United States. e-mail: jessica-e-hall@uiowa.edu
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Abstract

The goal of this study was to determine if typically developing children could form grammatical categories from distributional information alone. Twenty-seven children aged six to nine listened to an artificial grammar which contained strategic gaps in its distribution. At test, we compared how children rated novel sentences that fit the grammar to sentences that were ungrammatical. Sentences could be distinguished only through the formation of categories of words with shared distributional properties. Children's ratings revealed that they could discriminate grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. These data lend support to the hypothesis that distributional learning is a potential mechanism for learning grammatical categories in a first language.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , May 2018 , pp. 717 - 735
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

We thank Elizabeth Wonnacott for her assistance with Bayesian analyses, and found Wonnacott, Nation, and Brown (2017) particularly helpful for reporting and interpreting Bayes factors. We also thank Tim Arbisi-Kelm, Caitie Hilliard, Sarah O'Neill, and Elissa Newport for their help with stimuli creation. Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute On Deafness And Other Communication Disorders of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number F31DC015370. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

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