A Word-Order Database for Testing Computational Models of Language Acquisition

An investment of effort over the last two years has begun to produce a wealth of data concerning computational psycholinguistic models of syntax acquisition. The data is generated by running simulations on a recently completed database of word tterns from over 3,000 abstract languages. This article presents the design of the database which contains sentence patterns, grammars and derivations that can be used to test acquisition models from widely divergent paradigms. The domain is generated from grammars that are linguistically motivated by current syntactic theory and the sentence patterns have been validated as psychologically/developmentally plausible by checking their frequency of occurrence in corpora of child-directed speech. A small case-study simulation is also presented.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ACL
• Authors: William Gregory Sakas
• Keywords: ACL 2003, ACL 2007, Computational Psycholinguistic Models, Sentence Patterns, Syntax Acquisition