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Related Concept Videos

Language Development01:22

Language Development

Children master language quickly and with relative ease, supported by both biological predisposition and reinforcement. B. F. Skinner (1957) proposed that language is learned through reinforcement, while Noam Chomsky (1965) argued that language acquisition mechanisms are biologically determined.
The critical period for language acquisition suggests that the ability to acquire language is at its peak early in life. As people age, this proficiency decreases. Language development begins very...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 23, 2026

Using the Visual World Paradigm to Study Sentence Comprehension in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Autism
06:15

Using the Visual World Paradigm to Study Sentence Comprehension in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Autism

Published on: October 3, 2018

Predicted errors in children's early sentence comprehension.

Yael Gertner1, Cynthia Fisher

  • 1University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820, United States.

Cognition
|April 25, 2012
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Toddlers use sentence structure to learn verbs, a process called syntactic bootstrapping. However, 21-month-olds mistakenly interpret sentences with two nouns due to relying on partial syntactic information.

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Portable Intermodal Preferential Looking (IPL): Investigating Language Comprehension in Typically Developing Toddlers and Young Children with Autism

Published on: December 14, 2012

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Linguistics
  • Cognitive Science

Background:

  • Children learn language through syntactic bootstrapping, using sentence structure to interpret meaning and acquire new verbs.
  • The structure-mapping account suggests early syntactic learning relies on partial sentence representations, like the nouns associated with a verb.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To test the prediction that toddlers struggle to differentiate transitive and other two-noun sentences.
  • To investigate whether 21-month-olds apply learned noun-order knowledge to intransitive sentences.

Main Methods:

  • Two experiments were conducted with 21-month-old infants.
  • Participants' interpretation of novel intransitive sentences with varying noun order was assessed.

Main Results:

  • 21-month-olds incorrectly assigned different meanings to "The boy and the girl are gorping!" and "The girl and the boy are gorping!".
  • This indicates infants applied transitive sentence structure knowledge to intransitive contexts.

Conclusions:

  • Toddlers utilize partial sentence structure representations for interpretation and learning.
  • These simplified representations are effective but can lead to predictable errors in early language acquisition.