Children’s Use of Syntax In Word Learning

TL;DR: The authors investigated the role of syntax in guiding the acquisition of word meaning and found that children can use the syntactic distribution of a word as evidence for its meaning and discuss the principles of grammar that license such inferences.

Abstract: This chapter investigates the role that syntax plays in guiding the acquisition of word meaning. It reviews data that reveal how children can use the syntactic distribution of a word as evidence for its meaning and discusses the principles of grammar that license such inferences. We delineate the role of thematic linking generalizations in the acquisition of action verbs, arguing that children use specific links between subject and agent and between object and patient to guide initial verb learning. In the domain of attitude verbs, we show that children’s knowledge of abstract links between subclasses of attitude verbs and their syntactic distribution enable learners to identify the meanings of their initial attitude verbs, such as think and want. Finally, we show that syntactic bootstrapping effects are not limited to verb learning but extend across the lexicon.