Aris Xanthos

On the role of morphological richness in the early development of noun and verb inflection

This study proposes a new methodology for determining the relationship between child-directed speech and child speech in early acquisition. It illustrates the use of this methodology in investigating the relationship between the morphological richness of child-directed speech and the speed of morphological development in child speech. Both variables are defined in terms of mean size of paradigm (MSP) and estimated in a set of longitudinal spontaneous speech corpora of nine children and their caretakers. The children are aged 1;3–3;0, acquiring nine different languages that vary in terms of morphological richness. The main result is that the degree of morphological richness in child-directed speech is positively related to the speed of development of noun and verb paradigms in child speech.

Quantifying the Development of Inflectional Diversity

This study introduces a new metric for assessing the inflectional diversity of morphologically analyzed language transcripts. The proposed metric is based on the intuitive notion of mean size of paradigm (MSP) and makes extensive use of random sampling procedures for normalization purposes. This approach is systematically evaluated on the basis of large sets of Dutch acquisition corpora, including both child speech and child-directed speech. It is shown to be an efficient way of controlling for sample size in the measurement of inflectional diversity, as well as a suitable method for assessing inflectional development in longitudinal data. MSP is compared with ID (inflectional diversity) introduced by Malvern, Richards, Chipere, and Durán (2004).

Exploring variant definitions of pointer length in MDL

Within the information-theoretical framework described by (Rissanen, 1989; de Marcken, 1996; Goldsmith, 2001), pointers are used to avoid repetition of phonological material. Work with which we are familiar has assumed that there is only one way in which items could be pointed to. The purpose of this paper is to describe and compare several different methods, each of which satisfies MDLs basic requirements, but which have different consequences for the treatment of linguistic phenomena. In particular, we assess the conditions under which these different ways of pointing yield more compact descriptions of the data, both from a theoretical and an empirical perspective.

Software as Theory: A Case Study in the Domain of Text Analysis

This article proposes a reflection on a specific way of envisioning and valorizing the scholarly contribution of scientific software, namely by making explicit the model of data analysis that underlies it. It seeks to illustrate this way of studying a software construct by applying it to a particular text analysis program. Fundamental aspects of this programs design (input and output, data structures, process model, and user interface) are reviewed and discussed from the point of view of their implications in terms of theoretical commitments to a specific conception of text and text analysis. The conclusions of this case study notably emphasize the central role of user modelling in the assessment of scientific softwares epistemological contribution as well as the necessity of extending the proposed approach to a broader range of software applications.