{"pk":29315,"title":"Abstract Syntactic Knowledge or Limited-Scope Formulae: A ComputationalStudy of Childrens Early Utterances","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Do childrens early utterances reflect abstract syntactic knowledge or slot-filler formulae developed through word imita-tion? This study compares development of part-of-speech (POS) sequences with word sequences using language models(LMs) trained on mothers utterances (N=1,272,139) from CHILDES English corpora, in which POS tags are automaticallyassigned by MOR and POST programs (MacWhinney, 2000). Word-based and POS-based LM probabilities for childrensmulti-word utterances in the Providence corpus (Brschinger et al., 2013, 15-36 months, Nchildren=6, Nutterances=50,717)were calculated as a function of age. Word-based LM probability of childrens multi-word utterances first increases withage and then levels off after 23 months. By contrast, POS-based probability remains high and stable across all ages. Thissuggests children have adult-like syntactic knowledge even at a very early age when their word sequences are still notadult-like. The pattern of results supports the abstract syntax view. Additional studies will use more accurate POS-taggersand larger datasets.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Member Abstracts","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/47m6q115","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Qihui","middle_name":"","last_name":"Xu","name_suffix":"","institution":"City University of New York","department":""},{"first_name":"Martin","middle_name":"","last_name":"Chodorow","name_suffix":"","institution":"City University of New York","department":""},{"first_name":"Virginia","middle_name":"","last_name":"Valian","name_suffix":"","institution":"City University of New York","department":""},{"first_name":"Xiaomeng","middle_name":"","last_name":"Ma","name_suffix":"","institution":"City University of New York","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29315/galley/19186/download/"}]}