Conceptual Hierarchy in Child-Directed Speech: Implicit Cues are More Reliable (original) (raw)
In order for children to understand and reason about the world in an adult-like fashion, they need to learn that conceptual categories are organized in a hierarchical fashion (e.g., a dog is also an animal). While children learn from their first-hand observation of the world, social knowledge transmission via language can also play an important role in this learning. Previous studies have documented several cues in parental talk that can help children learn about conceptual hierarchy. However, these studies have used different datasets and methods which has made it difficult to compare the relative usefulness of various linguistic cues to conceptual knowledge and to test whether they scale up to naturalistic speech. Here, we study a large-scale corpus of English child-directed speech and used a unified classification-based evaluation method which allowed us to investigate and compare cues that vary in terms of how explicit the information they offer is. We found the more explicit cu...
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