Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper, we examine the success of developmentaldistributional analysis in English, German and Dutch. Weembed the mechanism for distributional analysis within anexisting model of language acquisition (MOSAIC) thatencodes increasingly long utterances, and compare resultsagainst a measure of ‘noun richness’ in child speech. We showthat, cross-linguistically, the mechanism’s success in buildingan early noun class is inversely related to the complexity of thedeterminer and noun gender system, and that merging ofdeterminers gives very similar results across languages. Theseresults suggest that children may represent grammaticalcategories at multiple levels of abstraction that reflect both thelarger category as well as its finer structure.