Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Temporal connectives are function words that relate events intime. Despite their ubiquity and utility, children acquire themeanings of temporal connective words late in development.Experimental work has uncovered patterns in the acquisitionof temporal connectives that clarify the learning challenge thatthese words pose to children. In particular, developmentalstudies have identified differing acquisition trajectories acrossconnective types, asymmetries in learning within pairs of re-lated connectives, and monotonic increases in comprehensionwith age. Expanding on prior theoretical accounts, we formal-ize temporal connective acquisition in a computational wordlearning framework. We demonstrate that each of the empir-ically determined acquisition patterns emerges in the learningbehavior of our computational model. Finally, we discuss ourfindings in relation to earlier theories and to general learnabil-ity concerns in language acquisition.