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PubMed · 2380274

Children use syntax to learn verb meanings.

L Naigles
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Abstract

Verb learning is clearly a function of observation of real-world contingencies; however, it is argued that such observational information is insufficient to account fully for vocabulary acquisition. This paper provides an experimental validation of Landau & Gleitman's (1985) syntactic bootstrapping procedure; namely, that children may use syntactic information to learn new verbs. Pairs of actions were presented simultaneously with a nonsense verb in one of two syntactic structures. The actions were subsequently separated, and the children (MA = 2;1) were asked to select which action was the referent for the verb. The children's choice of referent was found to be a function of the syntactic structure in which the verb had appeared.

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AttentionChild, PreschoolFemaleHumansInfantLanguage DevelopmentMaleSemanticsSpeech PerceptionVerbal LearningVocabularyJournal ArticleResearch Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

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L Naigles. 1990. Children use syntax to learn verb meanings.. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305000900013817

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