Children use syntax to guide verb learning in a process known as syntactic bootstrapping. Recent work explores how syntactic bootstrapping works—how it begins, and how it interacts with progress in syntax acquisition. We review evidence for three claims about the mechanisms and representations underlying syntactic bootstrapping: (1) Learners are biased to represent linguistic knowledge in a usefully abstract mental vocabulary, permitting rapid generalization of newly acquired syntactic knowledge to new verbs. (2) Toddlers collect information about each verb's combinatorial behavior in sentences based on listening experience, before they know anything about the verb's semantic content. (3) Syntactic bootstrapping begins with an unlearned bias to map nouns in sentences one‐to‐one onto the participant roles in events. These lines of evidence point toward a picture of early verb learning in which shallow structural analyses of sentences are intrinsically meaningful to learners, and in which information about verbs' combinatorial behavior pervades the lexicon from very early in development. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Syntactic bootstrapping
Can't access this content? Tell your librarian.
.jpg)
Sample stimuli from Gertner, Fisher, and Eisengart.20 Children aged 21 months viewed two caused motion events while hearing a novel transitive verb. The children looked reliably longer at the event in which the agent–patient role assignments were appropriate for the word order of the sentence they heard.
.jpg)
Sample stimuli from Yuan and Fisher.26 Two‐year‐olds watched dialogues in which they heard a novel verb in transitive or intransitive sentences. Next, they viewed test event while hearing the verb in isolation. Children who had heard transitive dialogues looked longer at the two‐participant event than did those who had heard intransitive dialogues. This dialogue effect disappeared in a control condition in which children heard only neutral audio during the test phase.
.jpg)
Video stimuli from Scott and Fisher.13 Two‐year‐olds viewed dialogues in which a new verb appeared in sentences with the distributional characteristics of causal alternation or unspecified object verbs. This dialogue experience affected their interpretation of the same verb when they later encountered it in a transitive sentence: children who had heard causal dialogues now looked longer at the causal event than did children who had heard the unspecified‐object dialogues.
Sample stimulus items, Fisher et al.28 Children saw training trials in which a hand pointed to a duck on a box, while the new word was presented as a noun or as a preposition. At test, children saw two test events: in each, the hand pointed to another duck on the box, while children heard the test sentence for their condition. The location‐match screen showed a different object (a non‐duck) on the box, and the object‐match screen showed another duck beside the box.
Access to this WIREs title is by subscription only.
Recommend to YourLibrarian Now!
The latest WIREs articles in your inbox
Sign Up for Article AlertsIn the Spotlight
Konrad Körding is Assistant Professor of Physiology and Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, part of Northwestern University. Before joining Northwestern in 2006, Professor Körding worked in three different research groups, most recently in 2004-2005 at MIT, studying machine learning and hierarchical Bayesian models.
Professor Körding is a member of the Swiss Society for Neuroscience, the German Society for Neuroscience, the Society for Neuroscience (USA) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Professor Körding’s current research with the Bayesian Behavior group aims to improve rehabilitation procedures through a greater understanding of motor learning. In order to do this the team studies how people move, and how these movements are affected by uncertainty.
Learn More