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Children use syntax to learn verb meanings
Abstract
Verb learning is clearly a function of observation of real-world contingencies; however, it is argued that such observational information is insufficient to account fully for vocabulary acquisition. This paper provides an experimental validation of Landau & Gleitman's (1985) syntactic bootstrapping procedure; namely, that children may use syntactic information to learn new verbs. Pairs of actions were presented simultaneously with a nonsense verb in one of two syntactic structures. The actions were subsequently separated, and the children (MA = 2;1) were asked to select which action was the referent for the verb. The children's choice of referent was found to be a function of the syntactic structure in which the verb had appeared.
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Citations
Cited by
The Structural Sources of Verb Meanings
Gleitman, L. (1990) · Language Acquisition · doi:10.1207/s15327817la0101_2 · Cited by 1,783
Structural priming: A critical review.
Pickering, M. J., & Ferreira, V. S. (2008) · Psychological Bulletin · doi:10.1037/0033-2909.134.3.427 · Cited by 1,047
Chang, F., Dell, G. S., & Bock, K. (2006) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/0033-295x.113.2.234 · Cited by 984
The Discovery of Spoken Language
Jusczyk, P. W. (2000) · The MIT Press eBooks · doi:10.7551/mitpress/2447.001.0001 · Cited by 936
How Children Use Input to Acquire a Lexicon
Hoff, E., & Naigles, L. (2002) · Child Development · doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00415 · Cited by 773
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Naigles, L.
- Venue
- Journal of Child Language
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 1990-06
- Volume
- 17
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 357-374
- ISSN
- 0305-0009 (ISSN-L)
- 1469-7602
- OpenAlex
- W2169495103
- Cited by
- 879
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 11.60
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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