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“Frequent Frames” in German Child‐Directed Speech: A Limited Cue to Grammatical Categories
Author(s) -
Stumper Barbara,
Bannard Colin,
Lieven Elena,
Tomasello Michael
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01187.x
Subject(s) - german , determiner , linguistics , word order , pronoun , categorization , computer science , natural language processing , word (group theory) , set (abstract data type) , artificial intelligence , grammatical category , part of speech , psychology , noun , philosophy , programming language
Mintz (2003) found that in English child‐directed speech, frequently occurring frames formed by linking the preceding (A) and succeeding (B) word (A_x_B) could accurately predict the syntactic category of the intervening word (x). This has been successfully extended to French (Chemla, Mintz, Bernal, & Christophe, 2009). In this paper, we show that, as for Dutch (Erkelens, 2009), frequent frames in German do not enable such accurate lexical categorization. This can be explained by the characteristics of German including a less restricted word order compared to English or French and the frequent use of some forms as both determiner and pronoun in colloquial German. Finally, we explore the relationship between the accuracy of frames and their potential utility and find that even some of those frames showing high token‐based accuracy are of limited value because they are in fact set phrases with little or no variability in the slot position.