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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.
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