Computer Modelling of Acquisition Orders in Child Language

Abstract

This paper presents the result that a computer program can mimic the acquisition by children of a selected set of grammatical morphemes. Roger Brown [Brown, 1973] studied the acquisition of 14 morphemes, and showed how a set of partial order relations describes this aspect of child language learning. We show that these relations can be given a computational basis. They follow directly from a class of Boolean learning algorithms which have three simple constraints in the manner in which they consider hypotheses. I will call these three constraints the CAM constraints. CAM constraint 1 is to increase the length of the conjuncts one term at a time. The second CAM constraint is to consider all hypotheses of the same length simultaneously. Finally, CAM constraint 3 is to collect all single-term hypotheses involving noun features into a single conjunction prior to Boolean learning.