We develop an approach to automatically identify the most probable multi-word constructions used in children’s utterances, given syntactically annotated utterances from the Brown corpus of CHILDES. The found constructions cover many interesting linguistic phenomena from the language acquisition literature, and show a progression from very concrete towards abstract constructions. We show quantitatively that for all children of the Brown corpus grammatical abstraction, defined as the relative number of variable slots in the productive units of their grammar, increases globally with age.

Parsing models have many applications in AI, ranging from natural language processing (NLP) and computational music analysis to logic programming and computational learning. Broadly conceived, a parsing model seeks to uncover the underlying structure of an input, that is, the various ways in which