Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper we evaluate a mechanism for the learning of wordcategories from distributional information against criteria ofpsychological plausibility. We elaborate on the ideasdeveloped by Redington et al. (1998) by embedding themechanism in an existing model of language acquisition(MOSAIC) and gradually expanding the contexts it has accessto in a developmentally plausible way. In line with child data,the mechanism shows early development of a noun category,and later development of a verb category. It is furthermoreshown that the mechanism can maintain high performance atlower computational overhead by disregarding tokenfrequency information, thus improving the plausibility of themechanism as something that is used by language-learningchildren.