CONNECTIONIST AND STATISTICAL APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE-ACQUISITION - A DISTRIBUTIONAL PERSPECTIVE

We propose that one important role for connectionist research in langu age acquisition is analysing what linguistic information is present in the child's input. Recent connectionist and statistical work analysin g the properties of real language corpora suggest that a priori object ions against the utility of distributional information for the child a re misguided. We illustrate our argument with examples of connectionis t and statistical corpus-based research on phonology, segmentation, mo rphology, word classes, phrase structure, and lexical semantics. We di scuss how this research relates to other empirical and theoretical app roaches to the study of language acquisition.