Because is why: Children’s acquisition of topoi through why questions

Christine Howes, Ellen Breitholtz, Vladislav Maraev


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:
SIGSEM
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
48–54
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.clasp-1.5
DOI:
Bibkey:
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)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.clasp-1.5.pdf