{"pk":26861,"title":"Evidence for a facilitatory effect of multi-word units on child word learning","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Previous studies have suggested that children possess cognitiverepresentations of multi-word units (MWUs) and that MWUscan facilitate the acquisition of smaller units contained withinthem. We propose that the formation of MWU representationsprecedes and facilitates the formation of single-word represen-tations in children. Using different computational methods,we extract MWUs from two large corpora of English child-directed speech. In subsequent regression analyses, we use ageof first production of individual words as the dependent and thenumber of MWUs within which each word appears as an in-dependent variable. We find that early-learned words appearwithin many MWUs – an effect which is neither reducible tofrequency or other common co-variates, nor to the number ofcontext words contained in the MWUs. Our findings supportaccounts wherein children acquire linguistic patterns of vary-ing sizes, moving gradually from the discovery of MWUs tothe acquisition of small-grained linguistic representations.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"multi-word units; age of first production; wordlearning; language acquisition; computational modeling"}],"section":"Talks: Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/14b8n45n","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Robert","middle_name":"","last_name":"Grimm","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Antwerp","department":""},{"first_name":"Giovanni","middle_name":"","last_name":"Cassani","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Antwerp","department":""},{"first_name":"Walter","middle_name":"","last_name":"Daelemans","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Antwerp","department":""},{"first_name":"Steven","middle_name":"","last_name":"Gillis","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Antwerp","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2017-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26861/galley/16497/download/"}]}