TY - JOUR
T1 - "Frequent frames" in german child-directed speech
T2 - A limited cue to grammatical categories
AU - Stumper, Barbara
AU - Bannard, Colin
AU - Lieven, Elena
AU - Tomasello, Michael
PY - 2011/8
Y1 - 2011/8
N2 - Mintz (2003) found that in English child-directed speech, frequently occurring frames formed by linking the preceding (A) and succeeding (B) word (A-x-B) could accurately predict the syntactic category of the intervening word (x). This has been successfully extended to French (Chemla, Mintz, Bernal, & Christophe, 2009). In this paper, we show that, as for Dutch (Erkelens, 2009), frequent frames in German do not enable such accurate lexical categorization. This can be explained by the characteristics of German including a less restricted word order compared to English or French and the frequent use of some forms as both determiner and pronoun in colloquial German. Finally, we explore the relationship between the accuracy of frames and their potential utility and find that even some of those frames showing high token-based accuracy are of limited value because they are in fact set phrases with little or no variability in the slot position.
AB - Mintz (2003) found that in English child-directed speech, frequently occurring frames formed by linking the preceding (A) and succeeding (B) word (A-x-B) could accurately predict the syntactic category of the intervening word (x). This has been successfully extended to French (Chemla, Mintz, Bernal, & Christophe, 2009). In this paper, we show that, as for Dutch (Erkelens, 2009), frequent frames in German do not enable such accurate lexical categorization. This can be explained by the characteristics of German including a less restricted word order compared to English or French and the frequent use of some forms as both determiner and pronoun in colloquial German. Finally, we explore the relationship between the accuracy of frames and their potential utility and find that even some of those frames showing high token-based accuracy are of limited value because they are in fact set phrases with little or no variability in the slot position.
KW - Child-directed speech
KW - Corpus analysis
KW - Distributional analysis
KW - German
KW - Grammatical categories
KW - Language acquisition
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=79960816266&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01187.x
DO - 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01187.x
M3 - Article
C2 - 21790746
SN - 0364-0213
VL - 35
SP - 1190
EP - 1205
JO - Cognitive Science
JF - Cognitive Science
IS - 6
ER -