DUGi

When Meaning Is Not Enough: Distributional and Semantic Cues to Word Categorization in Child Directed Speech

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One of the most important tasks in first language development is assigning words totheir grammatical category. The Semantic Bootstrapping Hypothesis postulates that, inorder to accomplish this task, children are guided by a neat correspondence betweensemantic and grammatical categories, since nouns typically refer to objects and verbs toactions. It is this correspondence that guides children’s initial word categorization. Otherapproaches, on the other hand, suggest that children might make use of distributionalcues and word contexts to accomplish the word categorization task. According to suchapproaches, the Semantic Bootstrapping assumption offers an important limitation, as itmight not be true that all the nouns that children hear refer to specific objects or people.In order to explore that, we carried out two studies based on analyses of children’slinguistic input. We analyzed child-directed speech addressed to four children under theage of 2;6, taken from the CHILDES database. The corpora were selected from theManchester corpus. The corpora from the four selected children contained a total of10,681 word types and 364,196 word tokens. In our first study, discriminant analyseswere performed using semantic cues alone. The results show that many of the nounsfound in parents’ speech do not relate to specific objects and that semantic informationalone might not be sufficient for successful word categorization. Given that there mustbe an additional source of information which, alongside with semantics, might assistyoung learners in word categorization, our second study explores the availability of bothdistributional and semantic cues in child-directed speech. Our results confirm that thiscombination might yield better results for word categorization. These results are in linewith theories that suggest the need for an integration of multiple cues from differentsources in language development

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