Integrating conceptual and syntactic cues
to understand the development
of English verb classes


Symposium on advances in distributional models
of language and meaning

MathPsych/ICCM 2017
July 24, 2017

Lisa Pearl


The process of language acquisition draws on a variety of information sources, including conceptual and syntactic cues. I discuss the integration of these cues in a probabilistic model of children's development of English verb classes, which allow children to recognize which linguistic contexts a verb can be used in. I evaluate existing representational theories that synthesize conceptual and syntactic cues in different ways by embedding these theories in a computational model of the language acquisition process. Current findings suggest an intuitive developmental trajectory for conceptual and syntactic representations, matching children's observed verb class knowledge from three to five years old.