Morphosyntactic cues to noun categorization in English child-directed speech

When Meaning Is Not Enough: Distributional and Semantic Cues to Word Categorization in Child Directed Speech

One of the most important tasks in first language development is assigning words to their grammatical category. The Semantic Bootstrapping Hypothesis postulates that, in order to accomplish this task, children are guided by a neat correspondence between semantic and grammatical categories, since nouns typically refer to objects and verbs to actions. It is this correspondence that guides childre...

Prosodic Cues to Noun and Verb Categories in Infant- Directed Speech

Prosodic Cues to Noun and Verb Categories in Infant-Directed Mandarin Speech

Mandarin Chinese, a Sino-Tibetan language, has distinct syntactic and morphological structures in comparison to IndoEuropean languages. This study concerns Chinese infants’ initial derivation of grammatical categories. We examined the prosodic properties of nouns and verbs of the maternal input speech. Non-word disyllabic noun-verb homophones were created and embedded in frequent carrier phrase...

What's in the input? Frequent frames in child-directed speech offer distributional cues to grammatical categories in Spanish and English.

Recent analyses have revealed that child-directed speech contains distributional regularities that could, in principle, support young children's discovery of distinct grammatical categories (noun, verb, adjective). In particular, a distributional unit known as the frequent frame appears to be especially informative (Mintz, 2003). However, analyses have focused almost exclusively on the distribu...

Preschoolers' use of morphosyntactic cues to identify generic sentences: indefinite singular noun phrases, tense, and aspect.

Generic sentences (e.g., "Birds lay eggs") convey generalizations about entire categories and may thus be an important source of knowledge for children. However, these sentences cannot be identified by a simple rule, requiring instead the integration of multiple cues. The present studies focused on 3- to 5-year-olds' (N = 91) use of morphosyntactic cues--in particular, on whether children can (...