I will shoot your shopping down and you can shoot all my tins---Automatic Lexical Acquisition from the CHILDES Database

Empirical data regarding the syntactic complexity of children’s speech is important for theories of language acquisition. Currently much of this data is absent in the annotated versions of the CHILDES database. In this perliminary study, we show that a state-ofthe-art subcategorization acquisition system of Preiss et al. (2007) can be used to extract largescale subcategorization (frequency) information from the (i) child and (ii) child-directed speech within the CHILDES database without any domain-specific tuning. We demonstrate that the acquired information is sufficiently accurate to confirm and extend previously reported research findings. We also report qualitative results which can be used to further improve parsing and lexical acquisition technology for child language data in the future.