Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous studies have suggested that children possess cognitiverepresentations of multi-word units (MWUs) and that MWUscan facilitate the acquisition of smaller units contained withinthem. We propose that the formation of MWU representationsprecedes and facilitates the formation of single-word represen-tations in children. Using different computational methods,we extract MWUs from two large corpora of English child-directed speech. In subsequent regression analyses, we use ageof first production of individual words as the dependent and thenumber of MWUs within which each word appears as an in-dependent variable. We find that early-learned words appearwithin many MWUs – an effect which is neither reducible tofrequency or other common co-variates, nor to the number ofcontext words contained in the MWUs. Our findings supportaccounts wherein children acquire linguistic patterns of vary-ing sizes, moving gradually from the discovery of MWUs tothe acquisition of small-grained linguistic representations.