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Representations of Nonlocal Syntactic Dependencies Feed Verb Learning in Infancy
Laurel Perkins1, Yuanfan Ying2, Alexander Williams3,4
1Department of Linguistics, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA.
Developmental Science
|May 12, 2026
Summary
Infants aged 19-21 months use wh-questions to learn new verbs, showing early syntactic skills support language development. This study introduces the novel Violation of Fit method to assess infant comprehension.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Infants develop the ability to understand both local and nonlocal syntactic dependencies in their second year.
- Early syntactic representations are thought to interact with language acquisition in other domains, such as vocabulary development.
- Prior research indicates 18-month-olds can process wh-phrases as nonlocal arguments in object wh-questions with known verbs.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how syntactic dependency acquisition interacts with early lexical development in infants.
- To determine if 19-21-month-old infants can process nonlocal wh-dependencies with novel verbs.
- To introduce and validate a new method, Violation of Fit, for assessing infant language comprehension.
Main Methods:
- A novel Violation of Fit method was developed, extending the Violation of Expectations paradigm.
- Infants (19-21 months) were exposed to dialogues featuring novel verbs in object wh-questions, transitive polar questions, or intransitive polar questions.
- Infant attention to a matching causal event was measured to assess if the verb was considered a good fit for the scene.
Main Results:
- Infants who heard object wh-question dialogues attended to test events similarly to those who heard transitive dialogues.
- Infants exposed to intransitive dialogues showed different attention patterns compared to wh-question and transitive dialogues.
- This indicates that 19-21-month-olds interpret object wh-questions with novel verbs as transitive, fitting them to causal scenes.
Conclusions:
- Immediately after acquiring wh-dependency representations, infants utilize them to facilitate verb learning.
- The findings suggest that syntactic development plays a crucial role in early lexical acquisition.
- The Violation of Fit method is a viable tool for studying infant language processing and semantic integration.
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