Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper presents the result that a computer program can mimic the acquisition by children of a sdected set of grammatical morphemes. Roger Brown [Brown, 1973] studied the acquisition of 14 morphemes, and showed how a set of partial order relations describes this aspect of child language learning. W e show that these relations can be given a computational basis. They follow directly from a class of Boolean learning algorithms which have three simple constraints in the manner in which they consider hypotheses. I will call these three constraints the C A M constraints. C A M constraint 1 is to increase the length of the conjuncts one term at a time. The second C A M constraint is to consider all hypotheses of the same length simultaneously. Finally, C A M constraint 3 is to collect all single-term hypotheses involving noun features into a single conjunction prior to Boolean learning.