ERIC Number: EJ1177287
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2018-May
Pages: 19
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
EISSN: N/A
Distributional Learning Aids Linguistic Category Formation in School-Age Children
Hall, Jessica; Owen Van Horne, Amanda; Farmer, Thomas
Journal of Child Language, v45 n3 p717-735 May 2018
The goal of this study was to determine if typically developing children could form grammatical categories from distributional information alone. Twenty-seven children aged six to nine listened to an artifcial grammar which contained strategic gaps in its distribution. At test, we compared how children rated novel sentences that ft the grammar to sentences that were ungrammatical. Sentences could be distinguished only through the formation of categories of words with shared distributional properties. Children's ratings revealed that they could discriminate grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. These data lend support to the hypothesis that distributional learning is a potential mechanism for learning grammatical categories in a first language.
Descriptors: Grammar, Classification, Children, Comparative Analysis, Sentences, Novelty (Stimulus Dimension), Hypothesis Testing
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: F31DC015370