Phrase Structure in a Computational Model of Child Language Acquisition

Abstract

Introduction Based upon an examination of existing computational models of child grammar acquisition, we argue that an account is required of how phrase structure may be acquired. Our goal is to model the acquisition of a phrase-structure grammar, without assuming innate knowledge of phrase structure such as X-Bar Theory. Other models have either relied on this assumption (e.g., Pinker 1984; Berwick 1985), or other ad hoc assumptions (e.g., Anderson 1977), or demonstrated the acquisition of...