Category induction from distributional cues in an artificial language. Mintz, T. H Mem Cognit, 30(5):678-86, 2002.
abstract   bibtex   
The ability to identify the grammatical category of a word (e.g., noun, verb, adjective) is a fundamental aspect of competence in a natural language. Children show evidence of categorization by as early as 18 months, and in some cases younger. However, the mechanisms that underlie this ability are not well understood. The lexical co-occurrence patterns of words in sentences could provide information about word categories–for example, words that follow the in English often belong to the same category. As a step in understanding the role distributional mechanisms might play in language learning, the present study investigated the ability of adults to categorize words on the basis of distributional information. Forty participants listened for approximately 6 min to sentences in an artificial language and were told that they would later be tested on their memory for what they had heard. Participants were next tested on an additional set of sentences and asked to report which sentences they recognized from the first 6 min. The results suggested that learners performed a distributional analysis on the initial set of sentences and recognized sentences on the basis of their memory of sequences of categories of words. Thus, mechanisms that would be useful in natural language learning were shown to be active in adults in an artificial language learning task.
@Article{Mintz2002,
  author   = {Toben H Mintz},
  journal  = {Mem Cognit},
  title    = {Category induction from distributional cues in an artificial language.},
  year     = {2002},
  number   = {5},
  pages    = {678-86},
  volume   = {30},
  abstract = {The ability to identify the grammatical category of a word (e.g.,
	noun, verb, adjective) is a fundamental aspect of competence in a
	natural language. Children show evidence of categorization by as
	early as 18 months, and in some cases younger. However, the mechanisms
	that underlie this ability are not well understood. The lexical co-occurrence
	patterns of words in sentences could provide information about word
	categories--for example, words that follow the in English often belong
	to the same category. As a step in understanding the role distributional
	mechanisms might play in language learning, the present study investigated
	the ability of adults to categorize words on the basis of distributional
	information. Forty participants listened for approximately 6 min
	to sentences in an artificial language and were told that they would
	later be tested on their memory for what they had heard. Participants
	were next tested on an additional set of sentences and asked to report
	which sentences they recognized from the first 6 min. The results
	suggested that learners performed a distributional analysis on the
	initial set of sentences and recognized sentences on the basis of
	their memory of sequences of categories of words. Thus, mechanisms
	that would be useful in natural language learning were shown to be
	active in adults in an artificial language learning task.},
  keywords = {Child Development, Cognition, Human, Infant, Newborn, Language Development, Linguistics, Support, Non-U.S. Gov, ', t, U.S. Gov, P.H.S., Adult, Concept Formation, Cues, Female, Language, Male, Problem Solving, Psycholinguistics, Semantics, Students, 12219885},
}

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