A Usage-Based Model of Early Grammatical Development

Abstract

The representations and processes yielding the limited length and telegraphic style of language production early on in acquisition have received little attention in acquisitional modeling. In this paper, we present a model, starting with minimal linguistic representations, that incrementally builds up an inventory of increasingly long and abstract grammatical representations (form+meaning pairings), in line with the usage-based conception of language acquisition. We explore its performance on a comprehension and a generation task, showing that, over time, the model better understands the processed utterances, generates longer utterances, and better expresses the situation these utterances intend to refer to.