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Paper presented at the 26th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, MA.
Integrating Distributional, Prosodic and Phonological Information in Syntax Acquisition:
A Connectionist Model
Morten H. Christiansen & Rick A.C. 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 basic syntactic structure by exploiting distributional, phonological, and prosodic cues. However, these cues are probabilistic, and are individually unreliable. We present a series of simulations exploring the integration of multiple probabilistic cues in a connectionist model. The first simulation shows that multiple-cue integration promotes significantly better, faster, and more uniform syntax acquisition. Our second simulation illuminates the potential contribution of prenatal language experience to syntax acquisition through multiple-cue integration. In a third simulation, we demonstrate the robustness of the multiple-cue model when faced with potentially distracting cues, uncorrelated with grammatical structure. Finally, we simulate recent data showing that two-year-olds can integrate grammatical markers (function words) and prosodic cues in sentence comprehension. Together, the simulations underscore the computational feasibility of the multiple-cue approach to syntax acquisition.
