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Distributional Information in Infant-Directed Speech: Analyzing Frequent Frames for Language Learning

Explore the role of distributional information in infant-directed speech, specifically focusing on frequent frames and their impact on language acquisition. Learn how these linear sequences can accurately categorize words and possibly help children understand abstract structural regularities in language.

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Distributional Information in Infant-Directed Speech: Analyzing Frequent Frames for Language Learning

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  1. Socal Workshop 2009 @ UCLA From linear sequences toabstract structures:Distributional information in infant-direct speech Hao Wang & Toby Mintz Department of Psychology University of Southern California This research was supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation (BCS-0721328).

  2. Outline • Introduction • Learning word categories (e.g., noun and verb) is a crucial part of language acquisition • The role of distributional information • Frequent frames (FFs) • Analyses 1 & 2, structures of FFs in child-directed speech • Conclusion and implication

  3. Speakers’ Implicit Knowledge of Categories Upon hearing: I saw him slich. Hypothesizing: They slich. He sliches. Johny was sliching. The truff was in the bag. He has two truffs. She wants a truff. Some of the truffs are here.

  4. Distributional Information • The contexts a word occurs • Words before and after the target word • Example • the cat is on the mat • Affixes in rich morphology languages • Cartwright & Brent, 1997; Chemla et al, 2009; Maratsos & Chalkley, 1980; Mintz, 2002, 2003; Redington et al, 1998

  5. Frequent frames (Mintz, 2003) • Two words co-occurring frequently with one word intervening FRAME FREQ. you__it 433 you__to 265 you__the 257 what__you 234 to__it 220 want__to 219 . . . the__is 79 . . . • Frame you_itPeter Corpus (Bloom, 1970) • 433 tokens, 93 types, 100% verbs

  6. Accuracy Results Averaged OverAll Six Corpora (Mintz, 2003)

  7. Structure of Natural Languages • In contemporary linguistics, sentences are analyzed as hierarchical structures • Word categories are defined by their structural positions in the hierarchical structure • But, FFs are defined over linear sequences • How can they accurately capture abstract structural regularities?

  8. Why FFs are so good at categorizing words? • Is there anything special about the structures associated with FFs? • FFs are manifestations of some hierarchically coherent and consistent patterns which largely constrained the possible word categories in the target position.

  9. Analysis 1 • Corpora • Same six child-directed speech corpora from CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000) as in Mintz (2003) • Labeled with dependency structures (Sagae et al., 2007) • Speech to children before age of 2;6 Eve (Brown, 1973), Peter (Bloom, Hood, & Lightbown, 1974; Bloom, Lightbown, & Hood, 1975), Naomi (Sachs, 1983), Nina (Suppes, 1974), Anne (Theakston, Lieven, Pine, & Rowland, 2001), and Aran (Theakston, et al., 2001).

  10. Grammatical relations • A dependency structure consists of grammatical relations (GRs) between words in a sentence • Similar to phrase structures, it’s a representation of structural information. Sagae et al., 2005

  11. Method • Consistency of structures of FFs • Combination of GRs to represent structure • W1-W3, W1-W2, W2-W3, W1-W2-W3 • Measures • For each FF, percentage of tokens accounted for by the most frequent 4 GR patterns • Control • Most frequent 45 unigrams (FUs) • E.g., the__ W1 W2 W3

  12. Results * t(5)=26.97, p<.001

  13. Top 4 W1-W3 GR patterns

  14. Analysis 1 Summary • Frequent frames in child-directed speech select very consistent structures, which help accurately categorizing words • Analysis 2, internal organizations of frequent frames

  15. Analysis 2 • Same corpora as Analysis 1 • GRs between words in a frame and words outside that frame (external links) and GRs between two words within a frame (internal links) • For each FF type, the number of links per token was computed for each word position External links Not counted Internal links

  16. Links from/to W1

  17. Conclusion & implications • Frequent frames, which are simple linear relations between words, achieve accurate categorization by selecting structurally consistent and coherent environments. • The third word (W3) helps FFs to focus on informative structures • This relation between a linear order pattern and internal structures of languages may be a cue for children to bootstrap into syntax

  18. Thank you! • References • MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. • Mintz, T. H. (2003). Frequent frames as a cue for grammatical categories in child directed speech. Cognition, 90(1), 91-117. • Sagae, K., Lavie, A., & MacWhinney, B. (2005). Automatic measurement of syntactic development in child language. ACL Proceedings. • Sagae, K., Davis, E., Lavie, A., MacWhinney, B. and Wintner, S. High-accuracy annotation and parsing of CHILDES transcripts. In, Proceedings of the ACL-2007 Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition.

  19. Pure frequent frames?

  20. Ana. 2 mean token coverage

  21. Ana. 2 FF external links Table 3 Average number of links per token for frequent frames

  22. FF internal links

  23. Ana. 2 FU links

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