ABSTRACT
Among the most fundamental components of syntactic systems are linguistic units, such as phrase or clause, and grammatical categories, such as determiner, noun, or verb. Arrangements of these elements constitute the basic phrase structure of such a system. In most contemporary grammatical theories, additional rules or constraints are formulated in terms of these elements and their configurations. Even theories that explicitly reject symbolic rules accept at least implicitly grammatical categories: Rumelhart and McClelland (1987) did not offer a theory of learning of past tenses of words, but rather a theory of learning of past tenses of verbs. Many of the chapters in this volume are concerned with whether the input speech stream might provide cues to syntactic units; in this chapter, we explore the feasibility of using aspects of the speech signal as means for bootstrapping rudimentary grammatical categories (see also chapters by Gerken, Kelly, Peters & Strömqvist, and Selkirk).
