Quantifying the syntactic bootstrapping effect in verb learning: A meta‐analytic synthesis

Cao, Anjie; Lewis, Molly

doi:10.1111/desc.13176

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 79 publications

(121 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The preschoolers with TD learned the verbs receptively and expressively, with large effect sizes across all conditions (r ¼ 0.58-0.74). This finding is consistent with past research in children with TD that evaluated verb learning using syntactic cues (see Cao & Lewis, 2022 for a review). Past research has also shown that children with TD learn transitive verbs that followed standard verb morphology (e.g., tiffing) using semantic cues (i.e., performing the action; Wakefield et al, 2018).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Strategies for Teaching Verbs to Children with and without Language Impairment

Prahl,

McDaniel

2023

Semin Speech Lang

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The aim of this feasibility study was to extend the current evidence base on intransitive verb learning by evaluating and comparing three strategies (syntactic cues, semantic cues, combined cues) for teaching novel verbs to expand the vocabularies of children with and without language impairment. Twenty-three children with typical development, seven children with developmental language disorder, and eight children with Down syndrome participated in Studies 1, 2, and 3, respectively. They were taught novel, intransitive verbs using syntactic, semantic, and combined cues and then asked to receptively identify and expressively label the novel verbs. Across all conditions, participants learned novel verbs receptively with large effect sizes and participants with typical development and Down syndrome also learned the verbs expressively with large effect sizes. There were no significant differences between conditions. This study extends word-learning research by evaluating not only receptive but also expressive intransitive verb learning to expand one's vocabulary. The results provide positive evidence for three effective strategies for teaching intransitive verbs to children with and without language impairment.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Strategies for Teaching Verbs to Children with and without Language Impairment

Prahl,

McDaniel

2023

Semin Speech Lang

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…First, in a recent meta-analysis, Cao and Lewis (2022) found that children tend to map the correct novel action in conditions using transitive sentences more systematically than in conditions using intransitive sentences. Our findings are in line with the findings of this meta-analysis.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another noteworthy feature of our design is the use of two persons in both the transitive and intransitive condition, unlike all previous syntactic bootstrapping studies that we know of. In a recent meta-analysis, (Cao & Lewis, 2022) mentioned that the scenes corresponding to transitive sentences may be more perceptually salient than those in intransitive conditions because of their two-actor layout. Children have been found to have a baseline preference for two actor events over one actor events (e.g., Yuan et al, 2012).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Children infer the meaning of novel verbs through morphological bootstrapping

Golan,

Shkara,

Havron

2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Children are incredibly efficient at detecting and extracting structure from input. Such skills are evident in the efficiency with which children learn language; for example, children in their second year of life already rely on syntactic context to infer the meaning of words, i.e., syntactic bootstrapping. However, the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis was originally developed using data from English-learning children, and tested mostly on Indo-European languages. Yet, languages vary in how they mark information. Here, we expand the idea of bootstrapping words’ meaning to include morphology - a linguistic feature which is lean in English but substantial cross-linguistically. Hebrew-speaking 3- to-4-year-olds (N = 29) viewed dialogues containing novel verbs constructed in familiar morphological templates: an intransitive template (hitCaCeC), and a template that tends to be transitive (CiCeC). Each dialogue was followed by a test phase, in which children viewed side-by-side a transitive video (a child performing a novel action on an adult), and an intransitive video (the child performing a novel action alone) - and heard a sentence containing the novel verb. Children looked more than chance towards the transitive video in transitive trials, but not on intransitive trials, suggesting they were able to use the transitive but not intransitive template to infer word meaning. This is consistent with previous results on syntactic bootstrapping. We discuss possible reasons why children might not have succeeded in the intransitive condition, and suggest that children rely on distributional information, instead of only hard rules, to infer word meaning.

show abstract

“…In addition, meta-analysis also allows the researcher to investigate the extent to which an effect varies across studies, and if so, to test whether certain study characteristics systematically produce different results. Meta-analysis is a commonly employed method in a wide variety of fields, including medicine (Haidich, 2010;L'Abbé et al, 1987), education (Glass, 1976;Slavin, 1984), criminology (Pratt, 2010;Turanovic & Pratt, 2021), business (Kirca & Yaprak, 2010), ecology (Gurevitch et al, 2001), and even other areas of psycholinguistics (Bergmann et al, 2018;Cao & Lewis, 2022;Cao et al, 2023).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Meta-analysis of Syntactic Satiation in Extraction from Islands

Lu,

Frank,

Degen

2024

Glossa Psycholinguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Sentence acceptability judgments are often affected by a pervasive phenomenon called satiation: native speakers give increasingly higher ratings to initially degraded sentences after repeated exposure. Various studies have investigated the satiation effect experimentally, the vast majority of which focused on different types of island-violating sentences in English (sentences with illicit long-distance syntactic movements). However, mixed findings are reported regarding which types of island violations are affected by satiation and which ones are not. This article presents a meta-analysis of past experimental studies on the satiation of island effects in English, with the aim of providing accurate estimates of the rate of satiation for each type of island, testing whether different island effects show different rates of satiation, exploring potential factors that contributed to the heterogeneity in past results, and spotting possible publication bias. The meta-analysis shows that adjunct islands, the Complex NP Constraint (CNPC), subject islands, the that-trace effect, the want-for construction, and whether-islands reliably exhibit satiation, albeit at different rates. No evidence for satiation is found for the Left Branch Condition (LBC). Whether context sentences were presented in the original acceptability judgment experiments predicts the differences in the rates of satiation reported across studies. Potential publication bias is found among studies testing the CNPC and whether-islands. These meta-analytic results can be used to inform debates regarding the nature of island effects and serve as a proof of concept that meta-analysis can be a valuable tool for linguistic research.

show abstract

Quantifying the syntactic bootstrapping effect in verb learning: A meta‐analytic synthesis

Cited by 7 publications

References 79 publications

Strategies for Teaching Verbs to Children with and without Language Impairment

Strategies for Teaching Verbs to Children with and without Language Impairment

Children infer the meaning of novel verbs through morphological bootstrapping

A Meta-analysis of Syntactic Satiation in Extraction from Islands

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About