title: What does syntax say about space? 2-year-olds use sentence structure to learn new prepositions.
abstract: Children as young as two use sentence structure to learn the meanings of verbs. We probed the generality of sensitivity to sentence structure by moving to a different semantic and syntactic domain, spatial prepositions. Twenty-six-month-olds used sentence structure to determine whether a new word was an object-category name (This is a corp!) or a spatial-relational term (This is acorp my box!). We argue that children rely on the intimate relationship between nouns in sentences and semantic arguments of predicate terms: Noting that a new word takes noun arguments identifies the new word as a predicate term, and directs the child's attention to relations among its arguments.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, 603 E. Daniel Street, Champaign, IL 61820, USA. clfishe@uiuc.edu
authors.forename: Cynthia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Fisher
authors.forename: Stacy L
authors.initials: SL
authors.lastname: Klingler
authors.forename: Hyun-Joo
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: Song
mesh_terms: D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D013028:Space Perception; D013060:Speech; D014706:Verbal Learning