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We report a quantitative analysis of the cross-utterance coordination observed in child-directed language, where successive utterances often overlap in a manner that makes their constituent structure more prominent, and describe the application of a recently published unsupervised algorithm for grammar induction to the largest available corpus of such language, producing a grammar capable of accepting and generating novel wellformed sentences. We also introduce a new corpus-based method for assessing the precision and recall of an automatically acquired generative grammar without recourse to human judgment. The present work sets the stage for the eventual development of more powerful unsupervised algorithms for language acquisition, which would make use of the coordination structures present in natural child-directed speech.

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e suggesting that parental linguistic input may be an important mechanism in cognitive word acquisition. Finally. young children tended to use know more to refer to themselves than to refer to others, whereas their parents know equally to refer to self and others. The importance of cognitive words in a theory of language acquisition is discussed. This research was supported in part by grant to William S. Hall and James R. Booth from the Educational Research and Development Centers Program No. as administered by the of Educational and Improvement, U.S. of Education. We thank J. and Latoya Jackson for their help in coding the transcripts. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania I52 13. University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742. University of California. Berkeley, California 94720. l University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089. `Address all correspondence to James R. Booth. Department of

As in the case of other non-English languages, the study of the acquisition of Turkish has mostly focused on aspects of grammatical morphology and syntax, largely neglecting the study of the effect of interactional factors on child morphosyntax. This paper reviews indications from past research that studying input and adult-child discourse can facilitate the study of the acquisition of morphosyntax in the Turkish language. It also provides some recent studies of Turkish child language on the relationship of child-directed speech to the early acquisition of morphosyntax, and on the pragmatic features of a certain kind of discourse form in child-directed speech called variation sets. As in the case of other non-English languages, the study of the acquisition of Turkish has mostly focused on aspects of grammatical morphology and syntax reflected in the productions of native learners at different age periods. Descriptive linguists and psycholinguists have long regarded the properties of the Turkish morphological system and complex syntax interesting from a crosslinguistic point of view. These cross-linguistically interesting, even exotic, properties of the language led students of acquisition to prioritize their research focus on these aspects in this relatively recent area. Some of the well-known findings in Turkish child language involve the ease and the relative

Abstract. Converging findings from English, Mandarin, and other languages suggest that observed “universals ” may be algorithmic. First, computational principles behind recently developed algorithms that acquire productive constructions from raw texts or transcribed child-directed speech impose family resemblance on learnable languages. Second, child-directed speech is particularly rich in statistical (and social) cues that facilitate learning of certain types of structures. Having surveyed a wide range of posited universals and found them wanting, Evans and Levinson (E&L) propose instead that the “common patterns ” observed in the organization of human languages are due to cognitive constraints and cultural factors. We offer empirical evidence in support of both these ideas. One kind of common pattern is readily apparent in the six examples of child-directed speech in Figure 1, in each of which partial matches between successive utterances serve to highlight the structural regularities of the underlying language. Two universal principles that allow such regularities to be learned can be traced to the work of Zellig Harris (1946; 1991). First, the discovery of language structure, from morphemes to phrases, can proceed by cross-utterance alignment and comparison (Harris, 1946; Edelman and Waterfall, 2007). Second, the fundamental task in describing a language is to state the departures from equiprobability in its sound- and word-sequences (Harris, 1991, p.32; cf. Goldsmith, 2007).