Several phonological and prosodic properties of words have been shown to relate to differences between grammatical categories. Distributional information about grammatical categories is also a rich source in the child's language environment. In this paper we hypothesise that such cues operate in tandem for developing the child's knowledge about grammatical categories. We term this the Phonological-Distributional Coherence Hypothesis (PDCH). We tested the PDCH by analysing phonological and distributional information in distinguishing open from closed class words and nouns from verbs in four languages: English, Dutch, French, and Japanese. We found an interaction between phonological and distributional cues for all four languages indicating that when distributional cues were less reliable, phonological cues were stronger. This provides converging evidence that language is structured such that language learning benefits from the integration of information about category from contextual and sound-based sources, and that the child's language environment is less impoverished than we might suspect.

中文翻译：

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音位分布连贯假说：语言习得中的跨语言证据☆

单词的几个音韵和韵律特性已被证明与语法类别之间的差异有关。有关语法类别的分布信息也是儿童语言环境中的丰富来源。在本文中，我们假设这些线索在发展儿童对语法类别的知识方面协同运作。我们将其称为音位分布相干假设 (PDCH)。我们通过分析语音和分布信息来测试 PDCH，以区分四种语言的开放类词和封闭类词以及名词和动词：英语、荷兰语、法语和日语。我们发现所有四种语言的语音和分配线索之间存在相互作用，表明当分配线索不太可靠时，语音线索会更强。