Input to verb learning: Evidence for the plausibility of syntactic bootstrapping

The theory of syntactic bootstrapping proposes that children use the syntactic frames in which verbs are presented as a source of information about their meaning. The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which maternal type and diversity of verb frames are consistent with the requirements of that theory. The uses of 25 common verbs in the speech of 57 mothers to their 1- to 2-year-old children were tabulated and parsed for syntactic frame. Analyses revealed 2 major findings concerning the use of verbs in child-directed speech : (a) Verbs in different semantic categories appear in different syntactic environments, and (b) individual verbs are distinguished by the set of frames in which they appear. These findings support the plausibility of the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis by demonstrating that children's input provides the structural cues to verb meaning that the syntactic bootstrapping procedure requires.

[1]  B. Landau.  Language and experience , 1985 .

[2]  K. Nelson,et al.  Syntax Acquisition: Impact of Experimental Variation in Adult Verbal Interaction with the Child. , 1973 .

[3]  E. Kako,et al.  First contact in verb acquisition: defining a role for syntax. , 1993, Child development.

[4]  Catherine E. Snow,et al.  Children's language , 1990 .

[5]  Steven Pinker,et al.  Language learnability and language development , 1985 .

[6]  P. Bloom.  Syntactic distinctions in child language , 1990, Journal of Child Language.

[7]  Melissa Bowerman,et al.  Evaluating competing linguistic models with language acquisition data: Implications of developmental errors with causative verbs. , 1982 .

[8]  S. Pinker.  Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure , 1989 .

[9]  Anne E. Fowler,et al.  Developmental shifts in the construction of verb meanings , 1992 .

[10]  Letitia R. Naigles,et al.  Children use syntax to learn verb meanings , 1990, Journal of Child Language.

[11]  Cynthia Fisher,et al.  On the semantic content of subcategorization frames , 1991, Cognitive Psychology.

[12]  Dorrit Billman,et al.  Observational Learning From Internal Feedback: A Simulation of an Adaptive Learning Method , 1988, Cogn. Sci..

[13]  M. Tomasello.  First Verbs: A Case Study of Early Grammatical Development , 1994 .

[14]  E. Hoff-Ginsberg,et al.  Some contributions of mothers' speech to their children's syntactic growth , 1985, Journal of Child Language.

[15]  E. Hoff-Ginsberg,et al.  Mother-child conversation in different social classes and communicative settings. , 1991, Child development.

[16]  Yonata Levy,et al.  Other Children, Other Languages : Issues in the theory of Language Acquisition , 1995 .

[17]  E. Markman,et al.  When it is better to receive than to give: Syntactic and conceptual constraints on vocabulary growth , 1994 .

[18]  Douglas A. Behrend,et al.  The development of verb concepts: children's use of verbs to label familiar and novel events. , 1990, Child development.

[19]  C. A. Ferguson,et al.  Talking to Children , 1977 .

[20]  Ray Jackendoff.  Semantics and Cognition , 1983 .

[21]  James L. Morgan,et al.  Signal to syntax : bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition , 1996 .

[22]  M. Tomasello,et al.  Joint attention on actions: acquiring verbs in ostensive and non-ostensive contexts , 1992, Journal of Child Language.