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Input evidence regarding the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Jean A. Rondal  and
Anne Cession
Jean A. Rondal*
Affiliation:
Université de Liège
Anne Cession
Affiliation:
Université de Liège
*
Laboratoire de Psycholinguistique, Université de Liège, Sart Tilman B-4000, Liège, Belgium.
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Abstract

The input language addressed to 18 language-learning children (MLU 1.00–3.00) was analysed so as to assess the quality of the semanticsyntactic correspondence posited by the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis. The correspondence appears to be quite satisfactory with little variation from the lower to the higher MLUs. All the persons and things referred to in the corpora were labelled by the mothers using nouns. All the actions referred to were labelled using verbs. Most of the attributive information was conveyed by adjectives. Spatial information was expressed through the use of spatial prepositions. As to the functional categories, all agents of actions and causes of events were encoded as subjects of sentences. All patients, themes, sources, goals, locations, and instruments were encoded as objects of sentences (either direct or oblique). This good semantic-syntactic correspondence may make the child's construction of grammatical categories easier.

Type
Notes and Discussion
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , October 1990 , pp. 711 - 717
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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Footnotes

*

We are indebted to Professor Steven Pinker for letting us have a copy of an unpublished paper by Hochberg & Pinker. We wish to express our appreciation to Jean-François Bachelet, Annette Lafontaine, Sylvie Mattiuz, Martine Exposito and Abdessadek El Ahmadi for helping with the analysis of the data.

References

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