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In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive
Science Society, 2001, p. 220-225. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates.
Integrating distributional, prosodic, and phonological information in a connectionist model of language acquisition
Morten H. Christiansen & Rick R. Dale
Abstract
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.
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