Bootstrapping operations in language acquisition: a computational psycholinguistic approach.

The acquisition of abstract linguistic categories is investigated. Computational models of bootstrapping operations are constructed in order to investigate how knowledge from one domain can be instrumental in acquiring knowledge of another domain. In our simulations the language addressed to very young children is used in an attempt to elucidate how grammatical categories and grammatical gender are acquired given a combination of distributional, phonological and morphological bootstrapping.

Keywords:LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, BOOTSTRAPPING, MACHINE LEARNING

Disciplines:Artificial intelligence, Cognitive science and intelligent systems, Linguistics