{"pk":50112,"title":"Are Global Statistics Discarded Statistics? An Investigation of What Types of  Co-Occurrence Statistics Could Support the Acquisition of Semantic Knowledge","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Much research examining the development of semantic knowledge has focused on patterns of co-occurrence in language. An often-made distinction concerns ‘local' co-occurrences (word pairs that appear close together) and ‘global' co-occurrences (word pairs that appear in similar linguistic contexts), with some recent accounts arguing that only local co-occurrences are exploitable by young children. We tested the alternative view that this dichotomy may be misaligned with natural language input. First, we performed a descriptive analysis of the co-occurrence structure present in the input. This analysis suggests that global co-occurrences are frequent in the input to children. Second, we performed a descriptive analysis of the semantic information encoded by local and global statistics in the CHILDES corpus; this analysis suggests that both local and global co-occurrences encode patterns of similarity that could support the acquisition of structured semantic representations.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Development; Language acquisition; Semantics of language; Statistical learning; Corpus studies"}],"section":"Abstracts with Poster Presentation (accepted as Abstracts)","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/16v77798","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Molly","middle_name":"I","last_name":"Niehaus","name_suffix":"","institution":"Carnegie Mellon University","department":""},{"first_name":"Tijana","middle_name":"","last_name":"Slepcev","name_suffix":"","institution":"Carnegie Mellon University","department":""},{"first_name":"Catarina","middle_name":"","last_name":"Vales","name_suffix":"","institution":"Carnegie Mellon University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/50112/galley/38074/download/"}]}