title: Do as I say, not as I do: a lexical distributional account of English locative verb class acquisition.
abstract: Children overgeneralise verbs to ungrammatical structures early in acquisition, but retreat from these overgeneralisations as they learn semantic verb classes. In a large corpus of English locative utterances (e.g., the woman sprayed water onto the wall/wall with water), we found structural biases which changed over development and which could explain overgeneralisation behaviour. Children and adults had similar verb classes and a correspondence analysis suggested that lexical distributional regularities in the adult input could help to explain the acquisition of these classes. A connectionist model provided an explicit account of how structural biases could be learned over development and how these biases could be reduced by learning verb classes from distributional regularities.
authors: University of Liverpool, UK.
authors: Katherine E
authors: KE
authors: Twomey
authors: University of Liverpool, UK. Electronic address: franklin.chang@liverpool.ac.uk.
authors: Franklin
authors: F
authors: Chang
authors: University of Liverpool, UK.
authors: Ben
authors: B
authors: Ambridge
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005793:Generalization, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics; D014705:Verbal Behavior
keywords: Connectionist model; Corpus analysis; Distributional learning; Language acquisition; Verb semantics