Syntactic bootstrapping

Children use syntax to guide verb learning in a process known as syntactic bootstrapping. Recent work explores how syntactic bootstrapping works-how it begins, and how it interacts with progress in syntax acquisition. We review evidence for three claims about the mechanisms and representations underlying syntactic bootstrapping: (1) Learners are biased to represent linguistic knowledge in a usefully abstract mental vocabulary, permitting rapid generalization of newly acquired syntactic knowledge to new verbs. (2) Toddlers collect information about each verb's combinatorial behavior in sentences based on listening experience, before they know anything about the verb's semantic content. (3) Syntactic bootstrapping begins with an unlearned bias to map nouns in sentences one-to-one onto the participant roles in events. These lines of evidence point toward a picture of early verb learning in which shallow structural analyses of sentences are intrinsically meaningful to learners, and in which information about verbs' combinatorial behavior pervades the lexicon from very early in development. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.