Integrating Distributional, Prosodic and Phonological Information in a Connectionist Model of Language Acquisition

Children acquire the syntactic structure of their native language with remarkable speed and reliability. Recent work in developmental psycholinguistics suggests that children may bootstrap grammatical categories and basic syntactic structure by exploiting distributional, phonological, and prosodic cues. However, these cues are probabilistic, and are individually unreliable. In this paper, we present a series of simulations exploring the integration of multiple probabilistic cues in a connectionist model. The first simulation demonstrates that multiple-cue integration promotes significantly better, faster, and more uniform acquisition of syntax. In a second simulation, we show how this model can also accommodate recent data concerning the sensitivity of young children to prosody and grammatical function words. Our third simulation illuminates the potential contribution of prenatal language experience to the acquisition of syntax through multiplecue integration. Finally, we demonstrate the robustness of the multiple-cue model in the face of potentially distracting cues, uncorrelated with grammatical structure.