Abstract
In this paper we look at how children learn the underlying principles of commonsense reasoning, sometimes referred to as topoi, which are prevalent in everyday dialogue. By examining the utterances of two children in the CHILDES corpus for whom there is extensive longitudinal data, we show how children can elicit topoi from their parents by asking why-questions. This strategy for the rapid acquisition of topoi peaks at around age three, suggesting that it is a critical step in becoming a fully competent language user.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.clasp-1.5
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2023 CLASP Conference on Learning with Small Data (LSD)
- Month:
- September
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Gothenburg, Sweden
- Editors:
- Ellen Breitholtz, Shalom Lappin, Sharid Loaiciga, Nikolai Ilinykh, Simon Dobnik
- Venue:
- CLASP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 48–54
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.clasp-1.5
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Christine Howes, Ellen Breitholtz, and Vladislav Maraev. 2023. Because is why: Children’s acquisition of topoi through why questions. In Proceedings of the 2023 CLASP Conference on Learning with Small Data (LSD), pages 48–54, Gothenburg, Sweden. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Because is why: Children’s acquisition of topoi through why questions (Howes et al., CLASP 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2023.clasp-1.5.pdf