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Counting the nouns: simple structural cues to verb meaning
Sylvia Yuan1, Cynthia Fisher, Jesse Snedeker
1Department of Psychology, University of California-Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. shyuan@berkeley.edu
Child Development
|May 24, 2012
Summary
Young children learn new verbs by using sentence structures, a process called syntactic bootstrapping. Even 19-month-olds use the number of nouns in sentences to understand verb meanings.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Children learn new words, especially verbs, rapidly during early development.
- Syntactic bootstrapping is a key mechanism where children use sentence structure to infer verb meaning.
- The structure-mapping account suggests an early bias for one-to-one mapping between nouns and event roles.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the developmental origins of syntactic bootstrapping.
- To determine if very young children use subcategorization frames to learn verbs.
- To test predictions of the structure-mapping account regarding early verb acquisition.
Main Methods:
- Three experiments were conducted with 136 infants aged 19 and 21 months.
- Infants were exposed to novel verbs in sentences with varying numbers of nouns (transitive vs. intransitive).
- Children's interpretations of the novel verbs were assessed based on sentence context.
Main Results:
- Infants demonstrated differential interpretations of novel verbs based on sentence structure.
- The number of nouns in a sentence (transitive vs. intransitive) influenced verb meaning assignment.
- This indicates that subcategorization frames guide verb interpretation from 19 months of age.
Conclusions:
- Subcategorization frames play a crucial role in early verb learning.
- Findings support the idea that children utilize syntactic cues for word acquisition from a very young age.
- The results provide constraints for theories explaining the mechanisms of syntactic bootstrapping.
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