Computational Linguistics Colloquium

Thursday, 24 January 2013, 16:15
Conference room, Building C7.4

Get out but don't fall down: computational investigations of verbs and verb-particle constructions in child language

Language acquisition has long attracted interest and generated much debate due to the apparent ease with which such a complex and dynamic system is learnt and used on the face of ambiguity, noise and uncertainty. Advances in machine learning and the increasing availability of resources and corpora of child-produced and child-directed sentences have enable large scale studies of the topic to be carried out. For instance, large annotated corpora of child language can be of great value in assessing theoretical proposals regarding language acquisition models, helping to determine whether the type and amount of data required by an approach can actually be found in a naturalistic data sample.

In this talk we describe one initiative extending the annotation of the English CHILDES corpora with linguistic, psycholinguistic and distributional information, the English CHILDES Verb Construction Database. This resource integrates various sources of information enabling more targeted complex searches involving different levels of annotation that can facilitate a more detailed analysis of the linguistic input available to children. We then look at the acquisition of verbs and verb-particle constructions, comparing child and adult language and examining possible factors that may affect language usage.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Matthew Crocker.