Children use syntax to learn verb meanings.
Verb learning is clearly a function of observation of real-world contingencies; however, it is argued that such observational information is insufficient to account fully for vocabulary acquisition. This paper provides an experimental validation of Landau & Gleitman's (1985) syntactic bootstrapping procedure; namely, that children may use syntactic information to learn new verbs. Pairs of actions were presented simultaneously with a nonsense verb in one of two syntactic structures. The actions were subsequently separated, and the children (MA = 2;1) were asked to select which action was the referent for the verb. The children's choice of referent was found to be a function of the syntactic structure in which the verb had appeared.
Naigles
L
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Yale University, New Haven, CT.
D001288:Attention; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014706:Verbal Learning; D014825:Vocabulary