Redington, M. & Chater, N. (1998). Connectionist and statistical
approaches to language acquisition: A distributional perspective. Language
and Cognitive Processes, 13, 129-191.
Abstract
We propose that one important role for connectionist research in
language acquisition is analysing what linguistic information is
present in the child's input. Recent connectionist and statistical
work analysing the properties of real language corpora suggest that a
priori objections against the utility of distributional
information for the child are misguided. We illustrate our argument
with examples of connectionist and statistical corpus-based research
on phonology, segmentation, morphology, word classes, phrase structure
and lexical semantics. We discuss how this research relates to other
empirical and theoretical approaches to the study of language
acquisition.
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Last modified: Jan 10, 1999