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How to measure development in corpora? An association strength approach*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 February 2009

SABINE STOLL  and
STEFAN TH. GRIES
SABINE STOLL*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
STEFAN TH. GRIES
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
*
Address for correspondence: Sabine Stoll, Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany. e-mail: stoll@eva.mpg.de
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Abstract

In this paper we propose a method for characterizing development in large longitudinal corpora. The method has the following three features: (i) it suggests how to represent development without assuming predefined stages; (ii) it includes caregiver speech/child-directed speech; (iii) it uses statistical association measures for investigating co-occurrence data. We exemplify the implementation of these proposals with data on the acquisition of the patterning of tense and grammatical aspect of four Russian children. The method, however, is suitable for a wide range of other acquisition questions as well.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 36 , Issue 5 , November 2009 , pp. 1075 - 1090
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

[*]

This paper was mainly written during the second author's stays at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. We warmly thank Elena Lieven, Michael Tomasello and Bernard Comrie for providing such a stimulating and fascinating work environment. We thank Roland Meyer, who has done a wonderful job in developing a morphological tagger for Russian, and Tatjana Welikanowa and Madelaine Taoubi for help with coding. We are grateful to Balthasar Bickel, Elena Lieven and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments.

References

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