A Statistical Study of First Language Acquisition:
A Statistical Study of First Language Acquisition:

No Gender Differeces in the Use of Parts of Speech

Summary/Abstract: The present study proposes a model of first language acquisition from the point of view of the development of the overall expressive capacities of children. We used data from large collections of child speech and worked on the use of different parts of speech within an utterance analyzing the role of factors such as gender and personality. To consider the effect of the stage of cognitive development and gender on the performance of a given child, we elaborate a regression model. We apply a mixed effect model in the terms of hierarchy regression with a random effect, representing the child's performance. The results show that only the age has a statistically significant effect on the performance. We have not found statistical evidence that the gender affects the use of different parts of speech in language acquisition. After multidimensional scaling, the obtained space suggests a specific role in the language acquisition of nouns, action verbs and communicators.

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