@unhammer

Children's grammars grow more abstract with age - Evidence from an automatic procedure for identifying the productive units of language

, , and . (2008)

Description

«...confirms the progressive abstraction hypothesis: abstraction, defined as the relative number of non-terminal leaves in multi-word constructions, increases with age. We show that it does so independently of sentence length. Complex constructions lose their lexical parts to specialized lexical rewrite rules, and in the process the constructicon becomes more abstract ... our version of the progressive abstraction hypothesis now becomes _falsifiable_»

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