The goal of this study is to investigate the semantic representations of lexical causatives in different genres to shed light on first language acquisition. We simulate processing with a computational approach probing the distributional features in child speech, child-directed speech and adult-to-adult speech. Both word embeddings and graph theory are employed to construct causative networks from the Manchester language acquisition corpus and the British National Corpus. The main findings are (i) children’s acquisition of causatives is constrained by the development in child-directed speech and (ii) child-directed speech exhibits reduced complexity than adult-to-adult speech, potentially facilitating the language development of infants.
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