Grammatical categorization based on frequent frames in Persian child-directed speech

Abstract

Previous research has revealed that distributional information obtained from child-directed speech could be informative for children when they are learning grammatical categories. Frequent frames are distributional units proposed by Mintz and explored by researchers in many languages with different typologies. This study investigated two parent–child corpora from the CHILDES database to determine frequent frames in Persian child-directed speech. To do so, a number of frequent frames in the two corpora and more specifically those which contained complex verbs were analyzed in detail. The results indicate that the accuracy of frequent frames in Persian (0.54) with some specific typological features is lower than that of English (0.91) at the word level due to the flexibility of the basic SOV order at the sentence level in Persian. It was also found that Persian frequent frames mostly included complex verbs. This evidence, along with the results of frames in categorizing words at this level, indicates that the accuracy of the frames is also affected by the fact that the subject position of verbs is mostly left vacant in Persian as a pro-drop language. That is why the non-finite forms of the verbs were taken into account when a verb was a part of the frames. The results also revealed that grammatical categories which mostly appeared in the context of frames were verbs, while the target words were nouns and adjectives.