On Language Acquisition through Womb Grammars

International audienceWe propose to automate the field of language acquisition evaluation through Constraint Solving; in particular through the use of Womb Grammars. Womb Grammar Parsing is a novel constraint based paradigm that was devised mainly to induce grammatical structure from the description of its syntactic constraints in a related language. In this paper we argue that it is also ideal for automating the evaluation of language acquisition, and present as proof of concept a CHRG system for detecting which of fourteen levels of morphological proficiency a child is at, from a representative sample of the child's expressions. Our results also uncover ways in which the linguistic constraints that characterize a grammar need to be tailored to language acquisition applications. We also put forward a proposal for discovering in what order such levels are typically acquired in other languages than English. Our findings have great potential practical value, in that they can help educators tailor the games, stories, songs, etc. that can aid a child (or a second language learner) to progress in timely fashion into the next level of proficiency, and can as well help shed light on the processes by which languages less studied than English are acquired