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Multiunit Sequences in First Language Acquisition[Note 3. The support of the Economic and Social Research Council ...]
Author(s) -
Theakston Anna,
Lieven Elena
Publication year - 2017
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/tops.12268
Subject(s) - rule based machine translation , construct (python library) , computer science , abstraction , word order , linguistics , meaning (existential) , word (group theory) , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , cognitive science , psychology , programming language , philosophy , epistemology , psychotherapist
Theoretical and empirical reasons suggest that children build their language not only out of individual words but also out of multiunit strings. These are the basis for the development of schemas containing slots. The slots are putative categories that build in abstraction while the schemas eventually connect to other schemas in terms of both meaning and form. Evidence comes from the nature of the input, the ways in which children construct novel utterances, the systematic errors that children make, and the computational modeling of children's grammars. However, much of this research is on English, which is unusual in its rigid word order and impoverished inflectional morphology. We summarize these results and explore their implications for languages with more flexible word order and/or much richer inflectional morphology.