In this paper we analyze the relation between adults’ intonational categories as described in the ToBI framework and children’s intonation contours, using a parametric approach and cluster evaluation methods. In the field of prosody, an increasing number of studies on the development of intonation apply the intonational categories of adult speech described as a sequence of high (H) and low (L) ...

The study proceeds from the results of the previous studies showing that the distributional characteristics (frequency) of language input are crucial for the acquisition of prepositions (Savić & Anđelković, 2005, in preparation). The authors analyze deviations in the distribution of prepositions in children's spontaneous speech from the prediction made on the basis of the distributional charact...

Prior research indicates that young children can generalize object properties on the basis of category information when it is conveyed by identical labels or semantically similar labels at the same level of taxonomy (i.e., synonyms) (Gelman & Markman, 1986). However, in previous research semantic similarity was confounded with co-occurrence probability. Therefore, it is possible that synonym-ba...

This paper reports progress in developing a computer model of language acquisition in the form of (1) a generative grammar that is (2) algorithmically learnable from realistic corpus data, (3) viable in its large-scale quantitative performance and (4) psychologically real. First, we describe new algorithmic methods for unsupervised learning of generative grammars from raw CHILDES data and give ...

Previous studies on the role of vowel harmony in word segmentation are based on artificial languages where harmonic cues reliably signal word boundaries. In this corpus study run on the data available at CHILDES, we investigated whether natural languages provide a learner with reliable segmentation cues similar to the ones created artificially. We observed that in harmonic languages (child-dire...