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Children’s Grammars Grow More Abstract with Age—Evidence from an Automatic Procedure for Identifying the Productive Units of Language
Author(s) -
Borensztajn Gideon,
Zuidema Willem,
Bod Rens
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
topics in cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.191
H-Index - 56
eISSN - 1756-8765
pISSN - 1756-8757
DOI - 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2008.01009.x
Subject(s) - rule based machine translation , linguistics , computer science , natural language processing , abstraction , grammar , artificial intelligence , variable (mathematics) , cover (algebra) , psychology , mathematics , philosophy , engineering , mechanical engineering , mathematical analysis , epistemology
We develop an approach to automatically identify the most probable multiword constructions used in children’s utterances, given syntactically annotated utterances from the Brown corpus of CHILDES. The found constructions cover many interesting linguistic phenomena from the language acquisition literature and show a progression from very concrete toward abstract constructions. We show quantitatively that for all children of the Brown corpus grammatical abstraction, defined as the relative number of variable slots in the productive units of their grammar, increases globally with age.