Acquisition Of Lexical Categories Research Articles

Lexical category acquisition is facilitated by uncertainty in distributional co-occurrences.

This paper analyzes distributional properties that facilitate the categorization of words into lexical categories. First, word-context co-occurrence counts were collected using corpora of transcribed English child-directed speech. Then, an unsupervised k-nearest neighbor algorithm was used to categorize words into lexical categories. The categorization outcome was regressed over three main distributional predictors computed for each word, including frequency, contextual diversity, and average conditional probability given all the co-occurring contexts. Results show that both contextual diversity and frequency have a positive effect while the average conditional probability has a negative effect. This indicates that words are easier to categorize in the face of uncertainty: categorization works best for words which are frequent, diverse, and hard to predict given the co-occurring contexts. This shows how, in order for the learner to see an opportunity to form a category, there needs to be a certain degree of uncertainty in the co-occurrence pattern.

Early category and concept development: making sense of the blooming, buzzing confusion

Foreword: Categories, Cognitive Development, and Cognitive Science Preface Acknowledgments Contributors 1. Issues in the Early Development of Concepts and Categories: An Introduction PART I. CONCEPTS AND CATEGORIES BEFORE THE EMERGENCE OF LANGUAGE 2. Chunking Language Input to Find Patterns 3. Concepts Are Not Just for Objects: Categorization of Spatial Relation Information by Infants 4. Parsing Objects into Categories: Infants' Perception and Use of Correlated Attributes 5. Conceptual Categorization 6. Principles of Developmental Change in Infants' Category Formation 7. Parts, Motion, and the Development of the Animate-Inanimate Distinction in Infancy 8. Commentary on Part I: Unresolved Issues in Infant Categorization PART II: CONCEPTS AND CATEGORIES DURING EARLY LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT 9. Links between Object Categorization and Naming: Origins and Emergence in Human Infants 10. Transaction of Child Cognitive-Linguistic Abilities and Adult Input in the Acquisition of Lexical Categories at the Basic and Subordinate Levels 11. Making an Ontology: Cross-linguistic Evidence 12. Words, Kinds, and Causal Powers: A Theory Theory Perspective on Early Naming and Categorization 13. Theory-Based Categorization in Early Childhood 14. The Acquisition and Use of Implicit Categories in Early Development 15. Commentary on Part II: Abilities and Assumptions Underlying Conceptual Development 16. Final Commentary: Conceptual Development from Origins to Asymptotes Author Index Subject Index

Productivity of lexical categories in French-speaking children with cochlear implants

The productivity of lexical categories was studied longitudinally in a sample of 17 young hearing-impaired French-speaking children with cochlear implants. Age of implantation ranged from 22 months to 76 months. Spontaneous speech samples were collected at six-month intervals over a period of 36 months, starting at the one-word stage. Four general measures of their linguistic production (number of utterances, verbal fluency, vocabulary, and grammatical production) as well as 36 specific lexical categories, according to the CHILDES codes, were computed in terms of tokens, i.e., total number of words. Cochlear-implanted children (CI) were compared to a French database of normally hearing children aged 2–4 compiled by the first author. Follow-up results indicate that, at the two-year post-implantation follow-up, noun, and verb morphology was significantly impaired. At the three-year follow-up, the cochlear-implanted group had recovered on adjectives, determiners and nouns, main verbs, and auxiliaries. The two groups differed significantly in processing locative adverbs, prepositions, pronouns, and verbs (infinitive verb, modal, and modal lexical), but individual variability within the cochlear-implanted group was substantial. Results are discussed in terms of recovery and developmental trends and variability in the acquisition of lexical categories by French children two years and three years post-implantation.