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Children use syntax to learn verb meanings*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Letitia Naigles
Letitia Naigles*
Affiliation:
Yale University
*
Department of Psychology, Box 11A Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520-7447, USA.
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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.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , June 1990 , pp. 357 - 374
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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Footnotes

*

This research was supported by a predoctoral fellowship from the American Association of University Women to the author while at the University of Pennsylvania. I am grateful to Lila Gleitman for directing this research, to the Temple University Infant Language Lab, directed by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, which provided laboratory facilities and equipment, and to H. Gleitman for help with Fig. 2. Thanks also go to Richard Gerrig, Roberta Golinkoff, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Steve Reznick and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this paper.

References

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