A self-organizing model of vocabulary acquisition by elementary school children
Hua Shu · Suvremena lingvistika · 2007
This study reports a connectionist model of vocabulary acquisition by elementary school children. Our model is based on the self-organizing feature maps which have significant psychological and biological plausibility. The model derives the orthographic and phonological representations of Chinese phonograms on the basis of realistic language corpus from vocabulary learning by elementary school children, and successfully simulates the effects of grade, regularity, frequency, and their interactions. The results from our modeling match up with children's learning patterns found in empirical studies, and are also consistent with statistical analyses of the available language corpora. Our study shows that children's vocabulary acquisition reflects their learning of statistical regularities inherent in the linguistic input.