Categorizing grammar: Differential effects of succeeding and preceding contextual cues

Distributional information has been shown to combine with phonological information in aiding categorisation of words into grammatical categories. There has been debate about the type of distributional information that is most useful in category learning, in particular whether bigrams are sufficient for category acquisition. This paper presents two experiments testing people’s sensitivity to bigram information for categorisation. Sentences were composed of words with category markers occurring either before (Experiment 1) or after (Experiment 2) the category word. Sentences were presented auditorily. Categorical information was learned in both experiments, but the preceding and succeeding distributional cues contributed to learning in different ways. Furthermore, in both cases phonological information assisted the learning of low frequency words