Learning novel phonological neighbors: Syntactic category matters

Learning novel phonological neighbors: Syntactic category matters.

Novel words (like tog) that sound like well-known words (dog) are hard for toddlers to learn, even though children can hear the difference between them (Swingley & Aslin, 2002, 2007). One possibility is that phonological competition alone is the problem. Another is that a broader set of probabilistic considerations is responsible: toddlers may resist considering tog as a novel object label beca...

Modelling phonological category learning

The term " phonological categories " refers to the discrete elements that make up a phonological representation, i.e. elements of its temporal organization (e.g. foot, syllable, mora, segment, or autosegment) and elements of its internal content (e.g. phonemes such as /p/ and /n/, or feature values such as [+nasal] and the high tone H). From the mere fact that the term " phonological category l...

Syntactic Category Learning as Iterative Prototype-Driven Clustering

We lay out a model for minimally supervised syntactic category acquisition which combines psychologically plausible concepts from standard NLP part-of-speech tagging applications with simple cognitively motivated distributional statistics. The model assumes a small set of seed words (Haghighi and Klein, 2006), an approach with motivation in (Pinker, 1984)’s semantic bootstrapping hypothesis, an...

Hybrid Syntactic Category Induction

Much research has been devoted to the task of learning lexical classes from unannotated input text. Among the chief difficulties facing any approach to the unsupervised induction of lexical classes are that of token-level ambiguity and the classification of rare and unknown words. Following the work of previous authors, the initial stage of syntactic category induction is treated in the current...

Phonological influences in syntactic alternations