Redington, M., Chater, N. & Finch, S. (1998).
Distributional information: A powerful cue for acquiring syntactic
categories. Cognitive Science, 22, 425-469.
Abstract
Many theorists have dismissed a priori the idea that
distributional information could play a significant role in syntactic
category acquisition. We demonstrate empirically that such
information provides a powerful cue to syntactic category membership,
which can be exploited by a variety of simple, psychologically
plausible mechanisms. We present a range of results using a large
corpus of child-directed speech and explore their psychological
implications. While our results show that a considerable amount of
information concerning the syntactic categories can be obtained from
distributional information alone, we stress that many other sources of
information may also be potential contributors to the identification
of syntactic classes.
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Last modified: Jan 10, 1999