Distributional information: A powerful cue for acquiring syntactic categories

Many theorists have dismissed a priori the idea that distributional informa tion could play a significant role in syntactic category acquisition. We de monstrate empirically that such information provides a powerful cue to synt actic category membership, which can be exploited by a variety of simple, p sychologically plausible mechanisms. We present a range of results using a large corpus of child-directed speech and explore their psychological impli cations. While our results show that a considerable amount of information c oncerning the syntactic categories can be obtained from distributional info rmation alone, we stress that many other sources of information may also be potential contributors to the identification of syntactic classes.