Morphosyntactic cues to noun categorization in English child-directed speech

•A set of distributional contexts in English child-directed speech can contribute to the categorization of nouns.•The input to which children are exposed contains enough distributional information for the onset of word categorization.•Child-directed speech contains a series of reliable cues that might assist young language learners in language development.

Mainstream research in Linguistics claims that grammatical regularities are scarcely represented in the linguistic input to which children are exposed. However, recent empirical research shows that child-directed speech contains a series of reliable cues that might assist young language learners in language development. The present study aims at testing whether English child-directed speech contains morphosyntactic regularities which might be robust enough for infants to group nouns in their grammatical category. The results from the study show that, in fact, the kind of input available to English-learning infants contains reliable and consistent distributional cues to account for most of the nouns to which children are exposed.