The phonological-distributional coherence hypothesis: Cross-linguistic evidence in language acquisition

@article{citeulike:2139139, abstract = {Several phonological and prosodic properties of words have been shown to relate to differences between grammatical categories. Distributional information about grammatical categories is also a rich source in the child's language environment. In this paper we hypothesise that such cues operate in tandem for developing the child's knowledge about grammatical categories. We term this the Phonological-Distributional Coherence Hypothesis (PDCH). We tested the PDCH by analysing phonological and distributional information in distinguishing open from closed class words and nouns from verbs in four languages: English, Dutch, French, and Japanese. We found an interaction between phonological and distributional cues for all four languages indicating that when distributional cues were less reliable, phonological cues were stronger. This provides converging evidence that language is structured such that language learning benefits from the integration of information about category from contextual and sound-based sources, and that the child's language environment is less impoverished than we might suspect.}, author = {Monaghan, Padraic and Christiansen, Morten H. and Chater, Nick }, citeulike-article-id = {2139139}, doi = {10.1016/j.cogpsych.2006.12.001}, journal = {Cognitive Psychology}, keywords = {cds, corpus-linguistics, statistical-learning, word-learning}, month = {December}, number = {4}, pages = {259--305}, posted-at = {2007-12-18 02:22:10}, priority = {4}, title = {The phonological-distributional coherence hypothesis: Cross-linguistic evidence in language acquisition}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2006.12.001}, volume = {55}, year = {2007} }

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:2139139 L3 - citeulike-article-id:2139139 TI - The phonological-distributional coherence hypothesis: Cross-linguistic evidence in language acquisition JF - Cognitive Psychology VL - 55 IS - 4 SP - 259 EP - 305 N2 - Several phonological and prosodic properties of words have been shown to relate to differences between grammatical categories. Distributional information about grammatical categories is also a rich source in the child's language environment. In this paper we hypothesise that such cues operate in tandem for developing the child's knowledge about grammatical categories. We term this the Phonological-Distributional Coherence Hypothesis (PDCH). We tested the PDCH by analysing phonological and distributional information in distinguishing open from closed class words and nouns from verbs in four languages: English, Dutch, French, and Japanese. We found an interaction between phonological and distributional cues for all four languages indicating that when distributional cues were less reliable, phonological cues were stronger. This provides converging evidence that language is structured such that language learning benefits from the integration of information about category from contextual and sound-based sources, and that the child's language environment is less impoverished than we might suspect. KW - cds KW - corpus-linguistics KW - statistical-learning KW - word-learning AU - Monaghan, Padraic AU - Christiansen, Morten AU - Chater, Nick PY - 2007/12// UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2006.12.001 ER -