Counting the Nouns: Simple Structural Cues to Verb Meaning

Two-year-olds use the sentence structures verbs appear in—subcategorization frames—to guide verb learning. This is syntactic bootstrapping. This study probed the developmental origins of this ability. The structure-mapping account proposes that children begin with a bias toward one-to-one mapping be...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Child development 2012-07, Vol.83 (4), p.1382-1399
Main Authors: Yuan, Sylvia, Fisher, Cynthia, Snedeker, Jesse
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Attention
Biological and medical sciences
Child
Child development
Child Language
Children
Children & youth
Classification
Cognitive models
Comprehension - physiology
Cues
Developmental psychology
EMPIRICAL ARTICLES
Experiments
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Infants
Intransitive verbs
Language
Language Acquisition
Language Development
Language instruction
Language Research
Learning
Learning - physiology
Linguistic Theory
Male
Nouns
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Sentence structure
Sentences
Syntactics
Syntax
Toddlers
Transitive verbs
Verbal behaviour
Verbs
Vocabulary
Words
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Summary:Two-year-olds use the sentence structures verbs appear in—subcategorization frames—to guide verb learning. This is syntactic bootstrapping. This study probed the developmental origins of this ability. The structure-mapping account proposes that children begin with a bias toward one-to-one mapping between nouns in sentences and participant roles in events. This account predicts that subcategorization frames should guide very early verb learning, if the number of nouns in the sentences is informative. In 3 experiments, one hundred and thirty-six 21- and 19-month-olds assigned appropriately different interpretations to novel verbs in transitive ("He's gorping him!") versus intransitive sentences ("He's gorping!") differing in their number of nouns. Thus, subcategorization frames guide verb interpretation in very young children. These findings constrain theoretical proposals about mechanisms for syntactic bootstrapping.
ISSN:0009-3920
1467-8624
DOI:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2012.01783.x