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...

Reading to young, pre-literate children is associated with better language and reading outcomes, but the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. The goal of this work is to better understand the potential mechanisms. We hypothesized that vocabulary diversity and sentence complexity might vary between picture books and child-directed speech, and we wanted to quantify those potential differe...

Although the language we encounter is typically embedded in rich discourse contexts, many existing models of processing focus largely on phenomena that occur sentence-internally. Similarly, most work on children's language learning does not consider how information can accumulate as a discourse progresses. Research in pragmatics, however, points to ways in which each subsequent utterance provid...

Most work on language acquisition treats word segmentation—the identification of linguistic segments from continuous speech— and word learning—the mapping of those segments to meanings—as separate problems. These two abilities develop in parallel, however, raising the question of whether they might interact. To explore the question, we present a new Bayesian segmentation model that incorporates...

This paper investigates the dynamics of childdirected speech in longitudinal data from the CHILDES corpus. We quantify the complexity of the speech used by each dialogue participant using simple measures. Our results show that there is a strong correlation in all measures between the complexity of the child’s and the mother’s utterances, indicating that adults adapt their speech at different le...

Adult-to-child interactions are often characterized by prosodically-exaggerated speech accompanied by visually captivating co-speech gestures. In a series of adult studies, we have shown that these gestures are linked in a sophisticated manner to the prosodic structure of adults' utterances. In the current study, we use the Preferential Looking Paradigm to demonstrate that two-year-olds can use...

Children can use the characteristic entailment patterns of verb classes to learn new verbs (Naigles, 1996), but how do they acquire verb classes? One possibility is that surface features that reflect argument structure can separate verb classes (Merlo & Stevenson, 2001). We tested this hypothesis by running clustering analyses on surface features of 29 verbs extracted from a large corpus of chi...