In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 970-975). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Phonological and Distributional Cues in Syntax Acquisition:
Scaling up the Connectionist Approach to Multiple-Cue Integration
Phonological and Distributional Cues in Syntax Acquisition: Scaling up the Connectionist Approach to Multiple-Cue Integration
Florencia Reali
Morten H. Christiansen
Padraic Monaghan
Abstract
Recent work in developmental psycholinguistics suggests that
children may bootstrap grammatical categories and basic
syntactic structure by exploiting distributional, phonological,
and prosodic cues. Previous connectionist work has indicated
that multiple-cue integration is computationally feasible for
small artificial languages. In this paper, we present a series of
simulations exploring the integration of distributional and
phonological cues in a connectionist model trained on a fullblown
corpus of child-directed speech. In the first simulation,
we demonstrate that the connectionist model performs very
well when trained on purely distributional information
represented in terms of lexical categories. In the second
simulation we demonstrate that networks trained on
distributed vectors incorporating phonetic information about
words also achieve a high level of performance. Finally, we
employ discriminant analyses of hidden unit activations to
show that the networks are able to integrate phonological and
distributional cues in the service of developing highly reliable
internal representations of lexical categories.Click here to download a PDF version.
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