Collocational bootstrapping: A hypothesis about the learning of subject-verb agreement in humans and neural networks

ArXi:2605.20529v1 Announce Type: new In what ways might statistical signals in linguistic input assist with the acquisition of syntax? Here we hypothesize a mechanism called collocational bootstrapping, in which regularities in word co-occurrence patterns can provide cues to syntactic dependencies. We investigate whether this mechanism can the acquisition of English subject-verb agreement. First, we simulate language acquisition by