Cognition (accepted pending revision)
The differential role of phonological and distributional cues in grammatical categorisation
Padraic Monaghan
Nick Chater
Morten H. Christiansen
Abstract
Recognising the grammatical categories of words is a necessary skill
for the acquisition of syntax and for on-line sentence processing. The
syntactic and semantic context of the word contribute as cues for
grammatical category assignment, but phonological cues, too, have been
implicated as important sources of information. The value of
phonological and distributional cues has not, with very few exceptions,
been empirically assessed. This paper presents a series of analyses of
phonological cues and distributional cues and their potential for
distinguishing grammatical categories of words in corpus analyses and a
language-learning experiment. The corpus analyses indicated that
phonological cues were more reliable for less frequent words, whereas
distributional information was most valuable for high frequency words.
We tested this prediction in an artificial language learning
experiment, where the distributional and phonological cues of
categories of nonsense words were varied. The results corroborated the
corpus analyses. For high-frequency nonwords, distributional
information was more useful, whereas for low-frequency words there was
more reliance on phonological cues. The results indicate that
phonological and distributional cues contribute differentially towards
grammatical categorisation.Click to request a copy of this paper.
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