Distributional Information and the Acquisition of Linguistic Categories: A Statistical Approach

Distributional information, in the form of simple, locally computed statistics of an input corpus, provides a potential means of establishing initial syntactic categories (noun, verb, etc.). Finch and Chater (1991, 1992) clustered words hierarchically, according to the distribution of local contexts in which they appeared in large, written English corpora, obtaining clusters that corresponded well with the standard syntactic categories. Here, a stronger demonstration of their method is provided, using `real' data, that to which children are exposed during category acquisition, taken from the childes corpus. For 2\Delta5 million words of adult speech, clustering on syntactic and semantic bases was observed, with a high degree of clear differentiation between syntactic categories. For child data, some noun and verb clusters emerged, with some evidence of other categories, but the data set was too small for reliable trends to emerge. Some initial results investigating the possibility of c..