Lexical categories at the edge of the word
Luca Onnis and Morten H. Christiansen
Abstract
Language acquisition may be one of the most difficult tasks that children face during development. They have to segment words
from fluent speech, figure out the meanings of these words, and discover the syntactic constraints for joining them together into
meaningful sentences. Over the past couple of decades computational modeling has emerged as a new paradigm for gaining
insights into the mechanisms by which children may accomplish these feats. Unfortunately, many of these models assume a
computational complexity and linguistic knowledge likely to be beyond the abilities of developing young children. In this paper
we show that, using simple statistical procedures, significant correlations exist between the beginnings and endings of a word and
its lexical category in English, Dutch, French, and Japanese. Therefore, phonetic information can contribute to individuating
higher-level structural properties of these languages. We also present a simple two-layer connectionist model that, once trained
with an initial small sample of words labeled for lexical category, can infer the lexical category of a large proportion of novel
words using only word-edge phonological information, namely the first and last phoneme of a word. The results suggest that
simple procedures combined with phonetic information perceptually available to children provide solid scaffolding for emerging
lexical categories in language development.
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