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title: Human language and development status: draft

Human language and development

From infancy to adulthood: stages, observations, and implications for PaniniFS.

Synthesis (draft)

  • Early communicative primitives (gestures, proto-words) as scaffolds for Dhātu mapping.
  • Progressive abstraction and compositionality; memory constraints shape semantic compression.

Hypotheses

  • Milestones correlate with stable semantic operators (e.g., agent/action/object, negation, temporal markers).

Validation paths

  • Align milestones with an incremental Dhātu set; evaluate coverage on child-directed corpora.

Key milestones (0–6y)

  • 0–9 months: proto-communication (gaze, pointing, babbling) → precursors of AGENT, ATTENTION, DEIXIS.
  • 10–18 months: single words, holophrases → compact intent encoding (implicit VERB/OBJECT).
  • 18–30 months: two-word stage, lexical burst → AAO patterns, basic spatial relations (ON/IN/AT).
  • 30–48 months: morphosyntax, tense, negation, quantification → operators: TENSE, MODALITY, QUANT.
  • 4–6 years: simple narratives, anaphora, theory of mind → COREFERENCE, CAUSALITY, INTENTION.

Dhātu alignment (sketch)

  • Core operators: AGENT, ACTION, PATIENT, PLACE, TIME, POSSESSION, NEGATION, QUANTIFICATION, MODALITY.
  • Progressive introduction rule: add a primitive only when a typical milestone requires it.

Micro-evaluations

1) Early negation - Utterance: "no sleep" (telegraphic) - Dhātu: [NEGATION] [ACTION:sleep] [AGENT:speaker]

2) Spatial relation - Utterance: "truck on bridge" - Dhātu: [OBJ:truck] [REL:ON] [REF:bridge]

3) Simple anaphora - Utterance: "Mary takes the book. She reads." - Dhātu: [AGENT:Mary][ACTION:take][OBJ:book] … [COREF:prior AGENT][ACTION:read]

Metrics

  • Milestone→primitive alignment rate per age band.
  • Success rate decoding telegraphic speech into full propositions.
  • Complexity reduction: active primitives vs. achieved expressivity.

Baby sign → Dhātu (micro-cases)

  • "more" (gesture) → [QUANT:>0] [ACTION:repeat]
    Object-oriented variant: [QUANT:>0] [ACTION:give] [OBJ:food/toy]
  • "milk" (hand squeeze) → [ACTION:drink] [OBJ:milk] [AGENT:addressee]
  • "all done" / "finished" → [NEGATION] [ACTION:continue]
    State variant: [STATE:finished]

Notes: - Reuse existing primitives (NEGATION, QUANT, ACTION, STATE) to avoid inflating the operator set. - Lexical choices (repeat, give, milk, continue, finished) are vocabulary; Dhātu inventory stays operator-focused.

References