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What's in the input? Frequent frames in child-directed speech offer distributional cues to grammatical categories in Spanish and English*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

ADRIANA WEISLEDER  and
SANDRA R. WAXMAN
ADRIANA WEISLEDER
Affiliation:
Stanford University
SANDRA R. WAXMAN*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
*
Address for correspondence: Sandra R. Waxman, Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, 2029 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208-2710; e-mail: s-waxman@northwestern.edu
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Abstract

Recent analyses have revealed that child-directed speech contains distributional regularities that could, in principle, support young children's discovery of distinct grammatical categories (noun, verb, adjective). In particular, a distributional unit known as the frequent frame appears to be especially informative (Mintz, 2003). However, analyses have focused almost exclusively on the distributional information available in English. Because languages differ considerably in how the grammatical forms are marked within utterances, the scarcity of cross-linguistic evidence represents an unfortunate gap. We therefore advance the developmental evidence by analyzing the distributional information available in frequent frames across two languages (Spanish and English), across sentence positions (phrase medial and phrase final), and across grammatical forms (noun, verb, adjective). We selected six parent–child corpora from the CHILDES database (three English; three Spanish), and analyzed the input when children were aged 2 ; 6 or younger. In each language, frequent frames did indeed offer systematic cues to grammatical category assignment. We also identify differences in the accuracy of these frames across languages, sentences positions and grammatical classes.

Type
Brief Research Report
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 37 , Issue 5 , November 2010 , pp. 1089 - 1108
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported by NIH R01 HD30410 to Waxman. Portions of this research were presented at the meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development (2007). We are indebted to E. Leddon for extensive discussions, and to M. Kaufman and T. Piccin for methodological expertise.

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