mcfrank

Sorry for the slow response. Our model is - we think - an advance because it actually allows us to infer the amount of shared structure between different words. This is an index of how much generalization the child is doing. If they do no generalization, that's evidence for what's called "item specific learning" (no abstract grammatical rules). If they do complete generalization, that's the innateness hypothesis in the paper I linked. What we found was - of course - a mixture, but critically with something close to item-based learning in the very earliest data from the very youngest kids.

Very cool!

All our code is at http://github.com/langcog/wordbank and you can access the database directly using the wordbankr R package (on cran).

A paper doing something similar to what you describe is in prep, with a conference version here:

http://langcog.stanford.edu/papers_new/braginsky-2016-underr...

Original researcher here. For context, people are not arguing that nothing is learned, but instead that children come innately prepared with abstract categories of "noun" and "determiner" even if they don't know which words are nouns or determiners or even exactly how these categories are combined.

Here's a paper that makes this argument: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~ycharles/PNAS-2013-final.pdf

Yes, thanks for your interest - we only have 50 concurrent users licensed. Never thought we'd get this much interest. :)

Hi, original researcher here - these forms have different words and different numbers of items, so it's complicated to compare absolute proportions across languages. I wouldn't infer that there are differences between populations from differences in the norms.