Cover not available
Article published In:
When Corpus Linguistics meets acquisition of Korean: Implications on the use of Korean corpora for developmental research on Korean
Edited by Gyu-Ho Shin
[Korean Linguistics 18:2] 2022
► pp. 125–158

Automatic analysis of caregiver input and child production

Insight into corpus-based research on child language development in Korean

| Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic
The present study explores the applicability of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to investigate child corpora in Korean. We employ caregiver input and child production data in the CHILDES database, currently the largest and open-access Korean child corpus data, and apply NLP techniques to the data in two ways: automatic Part-of-Speech tagging by adapting a machine learning algorithm, and (semi-)automatic extraction of constructional patterns expressing a transitive event (active transitive and suffixal passive). As the first empirical report on NLP-assisted analysis of Korean child corpora, this study is expected to reveal its advantages and drawbacks, thereby opening the window to furthering corpus-mediated research on child language development in Korean. Implications of this study’s findings will also contribute to research practice regarding developmental studies on Korean through child corpora, ensuring the reproducibility of procedures and results, which is often lacking in previous corpus-based research on child language development in Korean.
Keywords: Natural Language Processing, caregiver input, child production
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research on child corpora in Korean
  • 3.Towards automatic processing of child corpora: POS tagging
    • 3.1Issues with POS tagging in Korean
    • 3.2Developing a POS tagger for Korean child corpora
      • 3.2.1Pre-processing
      • 3.2.2Machine learning algorithm for POS tagging: Perceptron
      • 3.2.3Model performance
    • 3.3Results and discussion
  • 4.Towards automatic processing of child corpora: Construction identification
    • 4.1Challenges in automatic processing of active transitives and suffixal passives in Korean
    • 4.2Construction identification: Caregiver input
    • 4.3Construction identification: Child production
    • 4.4Model performance
    • 4.5Results and discussion
      • 4.5.1Accuracy of pattern-finder
      • 4.5.2Use of active transitives and suffixal passives: caregiver input
        • 4.5.2.1By-construction use
        • 4.5.2.2By-marker use
        • 4.5.2.3Summary of findings: Caregiver input
      • 4.5.3Use of active transitives and suffixal passives: Child production
  • 5.Conclusion: Implications on automatic processing of Korean child corpora for developmental research on Korean
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 30 September 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/kl.20002.shi
References (57)
References
Abbot-Smith, Kirsten, Franklin Chang, Caroline Rowland, Heather Ferguson & Julian Pine. 2017. Do two and three year old children use an incremental first-NP-as-agent bias to process active transitive and passive sentences?: A permutation analysis. PloS one 12.10. e0186129. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Alishahi, Afra & Suzanne Stevenson. 2008. A computational model of early argument structure acquisition. Cognitive Science 32.5. 789–834. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Allan, Lorraine G. 1980. A note on measurement of contingency between two binary variables in judgment tasks. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 15.3. 147–149. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ambridge, Ben, Evan Kidd, Caroline F. Rowland & Anna L. Theakston. 2015. The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition. Journal of Child Language 42.2. 239–273. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Behrens, Heike. 2006. The input-output relationship in first language acquisition. Language and Cognitive Processes 21.1–3. 2–24. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2009. Usage-based and emergentist approaches to language acquisition. Linguistics 47.2. 383–411. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cameron-Faulkner, Thea, Elena Lieven & Michael Tomasello. 2003. A construction based analysis of child directed speech. Cognitive Science 27.6. 843–873. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cameron-Faulkner, Thea, Elena Lieven & Anna Theakston. 2007. What part of no do children not understand? A usage-based account of multiword negation. Journal of Child Language 34.2. 251–282. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cho, Sook Whan. 1982. The acquisition of word order in Korean. MA thesis, University of Calgary.
Choi, Soonja. 1999. Early development of verb structures and caregiver input in Korean: Two case studies. International Journal of Bilingualism 3.2–3. 241–265. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Choi, Jinho D. & Martha Palmer. 2011. Statistical dependency parsing in Korean: From corpus generation to automatic parsing. In Proceedings of the second workshop on statistical parsing of morphologically rich languages, 1–11.Google Scholar
Choo, Miho & Kwak, Hye-Young. 2008. Using Korean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chung, Gyeonghee No. 1994. Case and its acquisition in Korean. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.
Collins, Michael & Nigel Duffy. 2002. New ranking algorithms for parsing and tagging: Kernels over discrete structures, and the voted perceptron. In Proceedings of the 40th annual meeting on association for computational linguistics, 263–270.Google Scholar
Dąbrowska, Ewa. 2008. The effects of frequency and neighbourhood density on adult speakers’ productivity with Polish case inflections: An empirical test of usage-based approaches to morphology. Journal of Memory and Language 58.4. 931–951. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Daumé III, Hal. 2015. A Course in machine learning (Ch3. The perceptron). [URL]
Desagulier, Guillaume. 2016. A lesson from associative learning: asymmetry and productivity in multiple-slot constructions. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 12.2. 173–219. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dittmar, Miriam, Kirsten Abbot-Smith, Elena Lieven & Michael Tomasello. 2008. German children’s comprehension of word order and case marking in causative sentences. Child Development 79.4. 1152–1167. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ellis, Nick. C. 2002. Frequency effects in language processing: A review with implications for theories of implicit and explicit language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 241. 143–188. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ellis, Nick C. & Fernando Ferreira-Junior. 2009. Construction learning as a function of frequency, frequency distribution, and function. The Modern Language Journal 93.3. 370–385. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Freund, Yoav & Robert E. Schapire. 1999. Large margin classification using the perceptron algorithm. Machine Learning 37.3. 277–296. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ghosh, Devyani, John B. Carter & Hal Daumé III. 2008. Perceptron-based Coherence Predictors. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on chip multiprocessor memory systems and interconnects.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele E., Devin M. Casenhiser & Nitya Sethuraman. 2004. Learning argument structure generalizations. Cognitive Linguistics 15.3. 289–316. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Honnibal, Matthew. 2013. A good part-of-speech tagger in about 200 lines of Python. [URL]
Honnibal, Matthew, Yoav Goldberg & Mark Johnson. 2013. A non-monotonic arc-eager transition system for dependency parsing. In Proceedings of the 7th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, 163–172.Google Scholar
Honnibal, Matthew & Mark Johnson. 2015. An improved non-monotonic transition system for dependency parsing. In Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 1373–1378. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Huang, Yi Ting, Xiaobei Zheng, Xiangzhi Meng & Jesse Snedeker. 2013. Children’s assignment of grammatical roles in the online processing of Mandarin passive sentences. Journal of Memory and Language 69.4. 589–606. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jin, Kyong-sun, Min Ju Kim & Hyun-joo Song. 2015. The development of Korean preschooler’ ability to understand transitive sentences using case-markers. The Korean Journal of Cognitive and Biological Psychology 28.3. 75–90.Google Scholar
Kim, Hung-gyu, Beom-mo Kang & Jungha Hong. 2007. 21seyki seycongkyeyhoyk hyentaykwuke kichomalmwungchi sengkwawa cenmang [21st century Sejong modern Korean corpora: Results and expectations]. In Proceedings of annual conference on human and language technology 31 1, 311–316.Google Scholar
Kim, Meesook. 2010. Syntactic priming in children’s production of passives. Korean Journal of Applied Linguistics 26.2. 271–290.Google Scholar
Kim, Seongchan, William O’Grady & Sookeun Cho. 1995. The acquisition of case and word order in Korean: A note on the role of context. Language Research 31.4. 687–695.Google Scholar
Kim, Shin-Young, Jee Eun Sung & Dongsun Yim. 2017. Sentence comprehension ability and working memory capacity as a function of syntactic structure and canonicity in 5-and 6-year-old children. Communication Sciences & Disorders 22.4. 643–656. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kim, Wansu & Cheol Young Ock. 2015. hankwuke kyekthul sacenkwa uymiyek pinto cengpolul sayonghan hankwuke uymiyek kyelceng [Korean semantic role labeling using case frame and frequency]. Journal of Korean Institute of Information Technology 11.2. 161–167.Google Scholar
Lee, Chungmin & Sook Whan Cho. 2009. Acquisition of the subject and topic nominals and markers in the spontaneous speech of young children in Korean. In The Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics 3 1 ed by Chungmin Lee, Greg Simpson and Youngjin Kim, 23–33. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lee, Hee Ran. 2004. 2sey hankwuk atonguy cwue paltal thukseng [A study of early subject acquisition in Korean]. Communication Sciences and Disorders 9.2. 19–32.Google Scholar
Lee, Ikseop. 2011. kwukehakkaysel [Introduction to Korean linguistics]. Seoul: Hakyensa.Google Scholar
Lee, Sun-Ar & Jin-Tak Choi. 2013. hankwuke Verb_OntoNetuy selkyeywa kwuchwuk [Design and implementation of Korean Verb_OntoNet]. Journal of Korean Institute of Information Technology 11.2. 161–167.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, Brian. 2000. The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk. Third Edition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
No, Gyeong Hee. 2009. Acquisition of case markers and grammatical functions. In The Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics 3 1 ed by Chungmin Lee, Greg Simpson and Youngjin Kim, 23–33. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Park, Jungyeul, Jeen-Pyo Hong & Jeong-Won Cha. 2016. Korean language resources for everyone. In JProceedings of the 30th Pacific Asia conference on language, information and computation: Oral Papers, 49–58.Google Scholar
Petrov, Slav, Dipanjan Das & Ryan McDonald. 2012. A universal part-of-speech tagset. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, 2089–2096.Google Scholar
Qi, Peng, Timothy Dozat, Yuhao Zhang & Christopher D. Manning. 2018. Universal dependency parsing from scratch. In Proceedings of the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies, 160–170. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rosenblatt, Frank. 1958. The perceptron: a probabilistic model for information storage and organization in the brain. Psychological Review 65.6. 386–408. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shin, Gyu-Ho. 2020. Connecting input to comprehension: First language acquisition of active transitives and suffixal passives by Korean-speaking preschool children. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.
Shin, Seo-in. 2006. kwumwun pwunsek malmwungchilul iyonghan hankwuke mwunhyeng yenkwu [A study on Korean sentence patterns using a parsed corpus]. Ph.D. dissertation, Seoul National University.
Sinclair, Hermina & Jean-Paul Bronckart. 1972. S.V.O A linguistic universal? A study in developmental psycholinguistics. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 141. 329–348. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Slobin, Dan I. & Thomas G. Bever. 1982. Children use canonical sentence schemas: A crosslinguistic study of word order and inflections. Cognition 12.3. 229–265. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sohn, Ho Min. 1999. The Korean language. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Song, Sanghoun & Jae-Woong Choe. 2007. Type hierarchies for passive forms in Korean. In Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Stanford Department of Linguistics and CSLI’s LinGO Lab, 250–270. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stefanowitsch, Anatol. 2011. Constructional preemption by contextual mismatch: A corpus-linguistic investigation. Cognitive Linguistics 22.1. 107–129. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stoll, Sabine, Kirsten Abbot-Smith & Elena Lieven. 2009. Lexically restricted utterances in Russian, German, and English child-directed speech. Cognitive Science 33.1. 75–103. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Straka, Milan & Jana Straková. 2017. Tokenizing, POS Tagging, lemmatizing and parsing UD 2.0 with UDPipe. In Proceedings of the CoNLL 2017 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies, 88–99. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Theakston, Anna L. 2004. The role of entrenchment in children’s and adults’ performance on grammaticality judgment tasks. Cognitive Development 19.1. 15–34. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, Michael. 1992. First verbs: A case study of early grammatical development. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2003. Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Wonnacott, Elizabeth, Jeremy K. Boyd, Jennifer Thomson & Adele E. Goldberg. 2012. Input effects on the acquisition of a novel phrasal construction in 5 year olds. Journal of Memory and Language 66.3. 458–478. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yeon, Jaehoon. 2015. Passives. In The handbook of Korean linguistics ed by Lucien Brown & Jaehoon Yeon, 116–136. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Shin, Gyu-Ho & Seongmin Mun
2024. Modelling child comprehension: A case of suffixal passive construction in Korean. Computer Speech & Language ► pp. 101701 ff. DOI logo
Shin, Gyu‐Ho & Seongmin Mun
2023. Explainability of neural networks for child language: Agent‐First strategy in comprehension of Korean active transitive construction. Developmental Science 26:6 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 10 august 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.