Monaghan Padraic, Chater Nick, Christiansen Morten H
Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
Cognition. 2005 Jun;96(2):143-82. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2004.09.001. Epub 2004 Dec 24.
Recognising the grammatical categories of words is a necessary skill for the acquisition of syntax and for on-line sentence processing. The syntactic and semantic context of the word contribute as cues for grammatical category assignment, but phonological cues, too, have been implicated as important sources of information. The value of phonological and distributional cues has not, with very few exceptions, been empirically assessed. This paper presents a series of analyses of phonological cues and distributional cues and their potential for distinguishing grammatical categories of words in corpus analyses. The corpus analyses indicated that phonological cues were more reliable for less frequent words, whereas distributional information was most valuable for high frequency words. We tested this prediction in an artificial language learning experiment, where the distributional and phonological cues of categories of nonsense words were varied. The results corroborated the corpus analyses. For high-frequency nonwords, distributional information was more useful, whereas for low-frequency words there was more reliance on phonological cues. The results indicate that phonological and distributional cues contribute differentially towards grammatical categorisation.
识别单词的语法类别是句法习得和在线句子处理的一项必要技能。单词的句法和语义上下文作为语法类别分配的线索发挥作用，但语音线索也被认为是重要的信息来源。除了极少数例外，语音和分布线索的价值尚未得到实证评估。本文对语音线索和分布线索及其在语料库分析中区分单词语法类别的潜力进行了一系列分析。语料库分析表明，语音线索对低频词更可靠，而分布信息对高频词最有价值。我们在一项人工语言学习实验中检验了这一预测，在该实验中，无意义单词类别的分布和语音线索有所不同。结果证实了语料库分析。对于高频非词，分布信息更有用，而对于低频词，则更多地依赖语音线索。结果表明，语音和分布线索对语法分类的贡献有所不同。
