---
title: "A Language-agnostic Model of Child Language Acquisition — Mahon 2024"
description: "The authors port Abend et al.'s semantic-bootstrapping learner from English to Hebrew. 23 references, cited by 1 paper here."
authors: ["Louis Mahon", "Omri Abend", "Uri Berger", "Katherine Demuth", "Mark Johnson", "Mark Steedman"]
year: 2024
venue: "arXiv:2408.12254"
source: "https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.12254"
arxiv: "2408.12254"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (arXiv)"
licence_url: "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/mahon-2024-language-agnostic-model-child-language/"
---
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# A Language-agnostic Model of Child Language Acquisition

**Authors:** [Louis Mahon](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/louis-mahon/); [Omri Abend](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/omri-abend/); Uri Berger; Katherine Demuth; [Mark Johnson](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/mark-johnson/); [Mark Steedman](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/mark-steedman/) · **Year:** 2024 · **Venue:** arXiv:2408.12254 **Link:** [arxiv.org/abs/2408.12254](https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.12254) · library `langstream-2024-mahon-language-agnostic-model-child-language` · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

[**2** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W4402976481) OpenAlex, 2026-10-14 · **1** citations in our library of the 140,884 papers whose bibliographies we read · [arXiv:2408.12254](https://openalex.org/S91252481) · [licence](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.12254)
- [PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.12254)
- [arXiv 2408.12254](https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.12254)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4402976481)

**Authors (6)**

1. [Louis Mahon](https://openalex.org/A5021575951) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0571-4611) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2316636676) · h 4 · 40 citations · 31 works
2. [Omri Abend](https://openalex.org/A5059068945) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4311-3876) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2769805) · h 25 · 2,084 citations · 134 works
3. [Uri Berger](https://openalex.org/A5079498027) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5470-1414) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2052147700) · h 10 · 503 citations · 55 works
4. [Katherine Demuth](https://openalex.org/A5075485044) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3884-8886) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2407240) · h 50 · 9,246 citations · 242 works
5. [Mark Johnson](https://openalex.org/A5034461489) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4809-8441) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2316732513) · h 60 · 25,884 citations · 354 works
6. [Mark Steedman](https://openalex.org/A5055023881) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2509-0797) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2286449409) · h 63 · 18,831 citations · 358 works

Citations and author metrics: OpenAlex, 2026-10-14; authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The authors port Abend et al.'s semantic-bootstrapping learner from English to Hebrew. The learner sees one child-directed utterance at a time, paired with a logical form, and learns a CCG lexicon with EM over Dirichlet-process counts. The Hebrew data are from the CHILDES Hagar corpus (3,295 utterances), converted from UD annotation. The English Adam corpus (5,320 utterances) is the control. The learner gets word order right in both languages: SVO is favoured in both, faster and more clearly in English. Word meanings are right for the top 50 words in both (100%), while syntactic category agrees for 76% in English and 46% in Hebrew. With two distractor logical forms, Hebrew fails to settle on SVO. The gap is explained by richer morphology (more unseen word forms), and by copula-less Hebrew sentences: 73.9% of Hagar utterances are under three words, against 15.2% in Adam.

## Ideas

- I3. A flag for copula-less clauses: count clauses with no verb and no copula in each treebank, and mark them as non-evidence for word order before a verb-based rule runs.

## For Mova

- I1. A word-order preference measure over UD trees: for each sentence with a root verb, subject and object, count the six orders of S, V and O, normalise, and plot the preference over a corpus, as the paper does for its six scores. Run it on `treebanks/he/` and on an English treebank to compare the two.
- I2. A learning order that uses only evidence from sentences whose words are all already known (the "critical examples" of the paper). Use it as a curriculum in `world`: learn a clause-order rule only from sentences with no unseen words. Measure how many examples qualify in each language.

I1 is a measure in [languages/he/07-syntax.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/he/07-syntax/) and in `world`. I2 is a learning-order rule for `world`. I3 goes into [languages/he/07-syntax.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/he/07-syntax/) (copula-less predication) and [languages/he/04-nouns-adjectives-pronouns.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/he/04-nouns-adjectives-pronouns/) for the nominal clause.

## Institutions

[🎓**University of Edinburgh** Edinburgh · United Kingdom 202 works · 55,753 citations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-edinburgh/) · [🎓**The University of Melbourne** Melbourne · Australia 47 works · 19,957 citations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/the-university-of-melbourne/) · [🎓**Hebrew University of Jerusalem** Jerusalem · Israel 42 works · 8,354 citations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/hebrew-university-of-jerusalem/) · [🎓**Macquarie University** Sydney · Australia 12 works · 4,052 citations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/macquarie-university/)

Topics[Hebrew & Aramaic](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/hebrew-aramaic/) · [Semitic languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/semitic-languages/) · [Psycholinguistics & language acquisition](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/psycholinguistics/)

## Cite

Cite as Louis Mahon, Omri Abend, Uri Berger, Katherine Demuth, Mark Johnson and Mark Steedman. 2024. A Language-agnostic Model of Child Language Acquisition. arXiv:2408.12254.

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [arXiv 2408.12254](https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.12254)

```bibtex
@misc{mahon2024language,
  title = {{A Language-agnostic Model of Child Language Acquisition}},
  author = {Louis Mahon, Omri Abend, Uri Berger, Katherine Demuth, Mark Johnson and Mark Steedman},
  year = {2024},
  eprint = {2408.12254},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.12254}
}
```

- [← previous A Language Modeling Approach to Diacritic-Free Hebrew TTS](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/roth-2024-language-modeling-approach-diacritic-free/)
- [next → Annotating referential continuity in a school-writing corpus: first results](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/barletta-2024-annotation-de-la-continuite-referentielle/) — (Annotation de la continuité référentielle dans un corpus scolaire – premiers résultats)
- [↑ back to papers of 2024](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2024/page/5/)

## References

23 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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