ISSN : 1229-0718
Children use syntax to guide their verb learning—this is syntactic bootstrapping. The structure-mapping account proposes that syntactic bootstrapping begins with an innate bias to map nouns in a sentence onto participant roles in an event representation. Armed with this bias, infants interpret the number of nouns accompanying a new verb as evidence about the semantic structure of the sentence, and therefore, about the meaning of the verb. In this paper, I first review some of the evidence for the structure-mapping account, then discuss challenges to the account arising from the existence of languages that allow verbs’ arguments to be omitted, such as Korean. These challenges lead investigators to propose that an expectation of discourse continuity allows children to gather linguistic evidence for each verb’s arguments across sentences in a coherent discourse. Together, the proposed learning mechanisms and biases sketch a route whereby simple aspects of sentence structure guide verb learning from the start of multi-word sentence comprehension, and do so even if some of the new verb’s arguments are omitted due to discourse redundancy.
송현주, 최유정, 김민영 (2008). 한국어에서 담화 정보가 학령 전 아동의 문장 이해에미치는 영향. 한국심리학회지: 발달, 21(3), 81-97.
이우열, 김민주, 송현주 (2013). 한국 아동의문장 구조 정보를 활용한 문장 이해 능력의 발달. 한국심리학회지: 발달, 26(4), 125-139.
최영은 (2010). 한국어 복합 동사 습득 기제연구. 한국심리학회지: 발달, 23(3), 125-139.
Allen, S. (2008). Interacting pragmatic influences on children’s argument realization. In M. Bowerman & P. Brown(Eds.), Crosslinguistic perspectives on argument structure: Implications for learnability (pp. 191-210). Mahwah, NJ:Erlbaum.
Arnold, J. E., Brown-Schmidt, S., & Trueswell, J. C. (2007). Children’s use of gender and order-of-mention during pronoun comprehension. Language and Cognitive Processes, 22, 527-565.
Arunachalam, S. (2013). Two-year-olds can begin to acquire verb meanings in socially impoverished contexts. Cognition, 129, 569-573.
Arunachalam, S., Escovar, E., Hansen, M. A., & Waxman, S. R. (2013). Out of sight, but not out of mind: 21-month-olds use syntactic information to learn verbs even in the absence of a corresponding event. Language and Cognitive Processes, 28, 417-425.
Arunachalam, S., & Waxman, S. R. (2010). Meaning from syntax: Evidence from 2-year-olds. Cognition, 114, 442-446.
Bard, E., & Anderson, A. (1983). The unintelligibility of speech to children. Journal of Child Language, 10, 265-292.
Bergelson, E., & Swingley, D. (2012). At 6-9months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109, 3253-3258.
Bock, J. K., & Brewer, W. F. (1985). Discourse structure and mental models. In T. H. Carr (Ed.), New directions for child development: The development of reading skills (pp. 55-75). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Booth, A. E., & Waxman, S. R. (2009). A horse of a different color: Specifying with precision infants’ mappings of novel nouns and adjectives. Child Development, 80, 15-22.
Clancy, P. M. (1996). Referential strategies and the co-construction of argument structure in Korean acquisition. Typological Studies in Language, 33, 33-68.
Clancy, P. (2003). The lexicon in interaction:Developmental origins of preferred argument structure in Korean. In J. Du Bois, L. Kumpf, & W. Ashby (Eds.), Preferred argument structure: Grammaras architecture for function (pp. 81-108). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Amsterdam, Netherland: John Benjamins.
Clancy, P. M. (2009). Acquisition of argument structure and transitivity in Korean: A discourse-functional approach. In C. Lee, Y. Kim, & G. B. Simpson (Eds.), P. Li (Series Ed.), The Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics, Volume 3: Korean (pp. 34-49). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Dittmar, M.,Abbot-Smith, K., Lieven, E. V. M., & Tomasello, M. (2008). Young Germanchildren’s early syntactic competence: a preferential looking study. Developmental Science, 11, 575-582.
Du Bois, J. W. (1987). The discourse basis of ergativity. Language, 63, 805-855.
Fernandes, K. J., Marcus, G. F., Di Nubila, J. A., & Vouloumanos, A. (2006). From semantics tosyntax and back again: Argument structure in the third year of life. Cognition, 100, B10-B20.
Fisher, C. (1996). Structural limits on verb mapping: The role of analogy in children’s interpretation of sentences. Cognitive Psychology, 31, 41-81.
Fisher, C. (2000). From form to meaning: A role for structural analogy in the acquisition of language. In H. W. Reese (Ed.), Advances in Child Development and Behavior, Vol. 27 (pp. 1-53). New York, NY: Academic Press.
Fisher, C., Gertner, Y., Scott, R., & Yuan, S. (2010). Syntactic bootstrapping. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 1, 143-149.
Fisher, C., & Gleitman, L. R. (2002). Language acquisition. In H. F. Pashler (Series Ed.) & C. R. Gallistel (Volume Ed.), Stevens’ Handbook of Experimental Psychology, Vol 3: Learning and motivation (pp. 445-496). New York, NY:Wiley.
Gavarró, A., Leela, M., Rizzi, L., & Franck, J. (2015). Knowledge of the OV parametersetting at 19 months: Evidence from Hindi-Urdu. Lingua, 154, 27-34.
Ganea, P. A., Shutts, K., Spelke, E. S., & DeLoache, J. S. (2007). Thinking of things unseen: Infants’ use of language to update mental representations. Psychological Science, 18, 734-739.
Gertner,Y., & Fisher, C. (2012). Predicted errors in early sentenceinterpretation. Cognition, 124, 85-94.
Gertner, Y., Fisher, C., & Eisengart, J. (2006). Learning words and rules: Abstract knowledge of word order in early sentence comprehension. Psychological Science, 17, 684-691.
Gerken, L., Wilson, R., & Lewis, W. (2005). Infants can use distributional cues to form syntactic categories. Journal of Child Language, 32, 249-268.
Gillette, J., Gleitman, H., Gleitman, L.R., & Lederer, A. (1999). Human simulations of vocabulary learning. Cognition, 73, 135-176.
Gleitman, L. R., Cassidy, K., Nappa, R., Papafragou, A., & Trueswell, J. C. (2005). Hard words. Language Learning and Development, 1, 23-64.
Göksun, T., Küntay, A. C., & Naigles, L. R. (2008). Turkish children use morphosyntactic bootstrapping in interpreting verb meaning. Journal of Child Language, 35, 291-323.
Grosz, B. J., & Sidner, C. L. (1986). Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse. Computational Linguistics, 12, 175-204.
Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R. M. (1996). The origins of grammar: Evidence from early language comprehension. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hoff, E., & Naigles, L. R. (2002). How children use input to acquire a lexicon. Child Development, 73, 418-433.
Horowitz, A. C., & Frank, M. C. (2015). Young children’s developing sensitivity to discourse continuity as a cue for inferring reference. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 129, 84-97.
Jin, K. (2015). The role of syntactic and discourse information in verb learning (Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).
Jin, K., Cho, I., Shin, J., Fisher, C., & Song, H. (in preparation). Counting the (missing) nouns: Syntactic bootstrapping in Korean.
Jin, K., & Fisher, C. (2014). Early evidence for syntactic bootstrapping: 15-month-olds use sentence structure in verb learning. In W. Orman & M. Valleau (Eds.), Boston University Conference on Language Development. Boston, MA:Cascadilla Press.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983). Mental models:Towards a cognitive science of language, inference, and consciousness. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.
Kim, T. (2008). Subject and object markings in conversational Korean. Doctoral Dissertation. State University of New York at Buffalo.
Landau, B., & Gleitman, L. R. (1985). Language and experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lany, J., & Saffran, J. R. (2010). From statistics to meaning: infants’ acquisition of lexical categories. Psychological Science, 21, 284-291.
Lee, J. N., & Naigles, L. R. (2005). The input to verb learning in Mandarin Chinese: A role for syntactic bootstrapping. Developmental Psychology, 41, 529-540.
Lee, J. N., & Naigles, L. R. (2008). Mandarin learners use syntactic bootstrapping in verb acquisition. Cognition, 106, 1028-1037.
Levin, B., & Rappaport Hovav, M. (2005). Argument realization. New York, NY:Cambridge University Press.
Lidz, J., Gleitman, H., & Gleitman, L. R. (2003). Understanding how input matters:Verb learning and the footprint of universal grammar. Cognition, 87, 151-178.
Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn’t have learned: experimental evidence for syntactic structure at 18 months. Cognition, 89, B65-73.
Maye, J., Werker, J. F., & Gerken, L. (2002). Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination. Cognition, 82, B101-B111.
Messenger, K., Yuan, S., & Fisher, C. (2015). Learning verb syntax via listening: New evidence from 22-month-olds. Language Learning and Development, 11, 356-368.
Mintz, T., Newport, E., & Bever, T. (2002). The distributional structure of grammatical categories in speech to young children. Cognitive Science, 26, 393-424.
Naigles, L. R. (1990). Children use syntax to learn verb meanings. Journal of Child Language, 17, 357-314.
Naigles, L. R., & Kako, E. (1993). First contact in verb acquisition: Defining a role for syntax. Child Development, 64, 1665-1687.
Narasimhan, B., Budwig, N., & Murty, L. (2005). Argument realization in Hindi caregiver-child discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 37, 461-495.
Matsuo, A., Kita, S., Shinya, Y., Wood, G. C., & Naigles, L. (2012). Japanese two-year-olds use morphosyntax to learn novel verb meanings. Journal of Child Language, 39, 637-663.
Papafragou, A., Cassidy, K., & Gleitman, L. (2007). When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs. Cognition, 105, 125-165.
Pinker, S. (1984). Language learnability andlanguage development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Prince, E. (1992). The ZPG letter: Subjects, definiteness, and information-status. In S. Thompson & W. Mann (Eds.), Discourse description: Diverse analyses of a fund-raising text (pp. 295-325). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.
Rispoli, M. (1989). Encounters with Japanese verbs:Caregiver sentences and the categorization of transitive and intransitive action verbs. First Language, 9, 57-80.
Saylor, M. M., & Ganea, P. (2007). Infants interpret ambiguous requests for absent objects. Developmental Psychology, 43, 696-704.
Saylor, M. M., Osina, M., Tassin, T., Rose, R., & Ganea, P. (2016). Creature feature:Preschoolers use verbal descriptions to identify referents. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 152, 205-220.
Scott, K., Chu, J., & Schulz, L. (2017). Lookit (Part 2): Assessing the viability of online developmental research, results from three case studies. Open Mind, 1, 15-29.
Scott, R., & Fisher, C. (2009). Two-year-olds use distributional cues to interpret transitivityalternating verbs. Language and Cognitive Processes, 24, 777-803.
Song, H., & Fisher, C. (2005). Who’s “she”? Discourse prominence influences preschoolers’comprehension of pronouns. Journal of Memory and Language, 52, 29-57.
Song, H., & Fisher, C. (2007). Discourse prominence effects on 2.5-year-old children’s interpretation of pronouns. Lingua, 117, 1959-1987.
Seidl, A., Hollich, G., & Jusczyk, P. W. (2003). Early understanding of subject and object wh-questions. Infancy, 4, 423-436.
Skarabela, B., Allen, S. E., & Scott-Phillips, T. C. (2013). Joint attention helps explain why children omit new referents. Journal of Pragmatics, 56, 5-14.
Snedeker, J., & Gleitman, L. R. (2004). Why it is hard to label our concepts. In D. G. Hall &S. Waxman (Eds.), Weaving a lexicon (pp. 257-293). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sullivan, J., & Barner, D. (2016). Discourse bootstrapping: preschoolers use linguistic discourse to learn new words. Developmental Science, 19, 63-75.
Suzuki, T., & Kobayashi, T. (2017). Syntactic Cues for inferences about causality in language acquisition: Evidence from an argument-drop language. Language Learning and Development, 13, 24-37.
Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Waxman, S. R., & Booth, A. E. (2001). Seeing pink elephants: Fourteen-month-olds’interpretations of novel nouns and adjectives. Cognitive Psychology, 43, 217-242.
Wittek, A., & Tomasello, M. (2005). Young children’s sensitivity to listener knowledge and perceptual context in choosing referring expressions. Applied Psycholinguistics, 26, 541-558.
Xu, F., Cote, M., & Baker, A. (2005). Labeling guides object individuation in 12-month-old infants. Psychological Science, 16, 372-377.
Yuan, S., & Fisher, C. (2009). “Really? She blicked the baby?”: Two-year-olds learn combinatorial facts about verbs by listening. Psychological Science, 5, 619-626.
Yuan, S., Fisher, C., & Snedeker, J. (2012). Counting the nouns: Simple structural cues to verb meaning. Child Development, 83, 1382-1399.