A Computational Operationalisation of Competing Maturational Theories of Syntactic Development via Statistical Grammar Induction

TL;DR

This study uses statistical grammar induction to compare maturational theories of syntactic development, finding that the GROWING account better explains the order of syntactic category acquisition in children.

Contribution

It computationally operationalizes competing maturational theories, enabling explicit comparison of staged syntactic emergence hypotheses under identical learning conditions.

Findings

GROWING account outperforms INWARD in all evaluation metrics

Operationalization clarifies how different maturational orders affect learnability

Framework makes category acquisition explicit and testable

Abstract

This paper is concerned with what intermediate syntactic categories children acquire during first language development, and in what order. Maturational theories make different predictions. Bottom-up accounts (GROWING) propose that lexical and inflectional structure emerges first, while inward accounts (INWARD) predict early access to discourse-related categories. We computationally operationalise these hypotheses of staged syntactic emergence using statistical grammar induction, asking what each proposed ordering makes learnable when input and learning algorithm are held constant. Our framework makes category acquisition explicit and allows us to explore how different maturational orderings shape the structure that can be learned under identical conditions. Based on this operationalisation, the GROWING account significantly outperforms the INWARD account across three evaluation metrics.