Maternal infant-directed speech in Mandarin Chinese and Turkish
(two
mother–child dyads each; ages of children between 0;11 and 1;8) was
examined to see if cues exist in input that might assist infants'
assignment of words to lexical and functional item categories. Distributional,
phonological, and acoustic measures were analysed. In each
language, lexical and functional items (i.e. syllabic morphemes) differed
significantly on numerous measures. Despite differences in mean values
between categories, distributions of values typically displayed substantial
overlap.
However, simulations with self-organizing neural
networks supported the conclusion that although individual dimensions
had low cue validity, in each language multidimensional constellations
of presyntactic cues are sufficient to guide assignment of words to
rudimentary grammatical categories.