Objectives

Objectives

The proposed research aims at enhancing our understanding of how aspects of speakers’ grammars, especially those influenced by extra-grammatical factors, can be computationally modeled.

The project aims to: 

• Explore differences in stress grammars between children and adults by producing a body of experimental data that will shed light on unknown aspects of Greek acquisition.

• Construct a probabilistic computational model, based on Smolensky & Goldrick’s (2016) Gradient Harmonic Grammar (GHG), to simulate biases shaped by lexicostatistic frequencies and age-dependent factors. This grammar-informed GHG algorithm will be tested against grammatically naïve algorithms, such as Machine Learning Classifiers, in order to compare their performance to actual stress choices made by children and adults. 

• Develop an annotated for Part-of-Speech version of a school-aged children corpus (Helexkids database, Terzopoulos et al. 2017) to be used for estimating children’s vocabulary growth. 

• Create a Wordtool with 100 most frequent Helexkids words to be used by educators in designing language material and activities for children.