Abstract
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 children’s initial word categorization. Other approaches, on the other hand, suggest that children might make use of distributional cues and word contexts to accomplish the word categorization task. According to such approaches, the Semantic Bootstrapping assumption offers an important limitation, as it might not be true that all the nouns that children hear refer to specific objects or people. In order to explore that, we carried out two studies based on analyses of children’s linguistic input. We analyzed child-directed speech addressed to four children under the age of 2;6, taken from the CHILDES database. The corpora were selected from the Manchester corpus. The corpora from the four selected children contained a total of 10,681 word types and 364,196 word tokens. In our first study, discriminant analyses were performed using semantic cues alone. The results show that many of the nouns found in parents’ speech do not relate to specific objects and that semantic information alone might not be sufficient for successful word categorization. Given that there must be an additional source of information which, alongside with semantics, might assist young learners in word categorization, our second study explores the availability of both distributional and semantic cues in child-directed speech. Our results confirm that this combination might yield better results for word categorization. These results are in line with theories that suggest the need for an integration of multiple cues from different sources in language development.
Highlights
One of the most significant challenges for children when learning their first language is assigning words to their corresponding syntactic categories
The present paper undertakes a critical examination of these assumptions: on the one hand, it tests the reliability of semantic information by examining the amount of nouns in children’s input that refer to specific objects or people; on the other hand, it examines the accuracy with which words could be categorized on the basis of a combination of multiple cues
The objective of the first study described in the present paper was to analyze the potential usefulness of semantic information as far as the categorization of English nouns is concerned
Summary
One of the most significant challenges for children when learning their first language is assigning words to their corresponding syntactic categories. Other studies point out that object nouns or action verbs do not necessarily dominate children’s earliest lexical productions, neither in English, nor in other languages (Gopnik and Choi, 1995; Bassano, 2000) Still, those words which do not neatly map into their corresponding semantic category are correctly classified by children and they are used in a grammatical way. Empirical evidence from artificial language studies seems to suggest that children’s learning of grammatical structure as well as their word-reference associations improve when words are coherently marked by a combination of different types of cues, either phonological, distributional or semantic cues (Gomez and Lakusta, 2004; Gerken et al, 2005; Lany and Gomez, 2008; Lany, 2014). The second study examines the benefits that a combination of semantic and distributional information could provide to language learning children when facing the task of word categorization
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