Function Words as Statistical Cues for Language Learning

ArXi:2601.21191v2 Announce Type: replace What statistical properties might learning abstract grammatical knowledge from linear input? We address this question by examining the statistical distribution of function words. Function words have been argued to aid acquisition through three distributional properties: high frequency, reliable syntactic association, and phrase-boundary alignment. We conduct a cross-linguistic corpus analysis of 186 languages, which confirms that all three properties are universal.