Second, the measure makes sense theoretically, both from algorithmic and native language acquisition points of view.

We also make an interesting observation that the impressionistic evaluation of syntactic complexity is better approximated by the presence or absence of grammar and usage patterns (and not by their frequency of occurrence), an idea supported by studies in native language acquisition .

However, when considered in the context of language acquisition studies, this approach seems to be justified.

Studies in native language acquisition, have considered multiple grammatical developmental indices that represent the grammatical levels reached at various stages of language acquisition .

Similarly, Scarborough (1990) proposed the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn), according to which, the presence of particular grammatical structures, from a list of 60 structures (ranging from simple ones such as including only subjects and verbs, to more complex constructions such as conjoined sentences) is evidence of language acquisition milestones.

Prior studies in language acquisition and second language research have conclusively shown that proficiency in a second language is characterized by several factors, some of which are, fluency in language production, pronunciation accuracy, choice of vocabulary, grammatical sophistication and accuracy.

0 In the domain of native language acquisition , the presence or absence of a grammatical structure indicates grammatical development.

Informed by studies in second language acquisition and language testing that regard these factors as key determiners of spoken language proficiency, some researchers have focused on the objective measurement of these aspects of spoken language in the context of automatic assessment of language ability.

The idea that the level of syntactic complexity (in terms of its range and sophistication) can be assessed based on the distribution of POS-tags is informed by prior studies in second language acquisition .

Of course this work only scratches the surface in terms of investigating the role of function words in language acquisition .

Over the past two decades psychologists have investigated the role that function words might play in human language acquisition .

The goal of this paper is to determine whether computational models of human language acquisition can provide support for the hypothesis that

function words are treated specially in human language acquisition .

If true, this fact would have striking implications for theories and models of language acquisition , as well as numerous applications in natural language processing.

It is frequently invoked in theories of language acquisition .

It has also been employed in models of language acquisition (Parisien and Stevenson, 2011; Barak et al., 2012).