The Developmental Origins of Syntactic Bootstrapping

Abstract

Children use syntax to learn verbs, in a process known as syntactic bootstrapping. The structure-mapping account proposes that syntactic bootstrapping begins with a universal bias to map each noun phrase in a sentence onto a participant role in a structured conceptual representation of an event. Equipped with this bias, children interpret the number of noun phrases accompanying a new verb as evidence about the semantic predicate-argument structure of the sentence, and therefore about the meaning of the verb. In this paper, we first review evidence for the structure-mapping account, and then discuss challenges to the account arising from the existence of languages that allow verbs' arguments to be omitted, such as Korean. These challenges prompt us to (a) refine our notion of the distributional learning mechanisms that create representations of sentence structure, and (b) propose that an expectation of discourse continuity allows children to gather linguistic evidence for each verb's arguments across sentences in a coherent discourse. Taken together, the proposed learning mechanisms and biases sketch a route whereby simple aspects of sentence structure guide verb learning from the start of multiword sentence comprehension, and do so even if some of the new verb's arguments are omitted due to discourse redundancy.

Children's interpretation of ambiguous pronouns based on prior discourse

“…And starting at age 4, children use discourse coherence -as expressed by connectives such as and or because -to interpret the meaning of a novel word (Sullivan, Boucher, Kiefer, Williams, & Barner, 2019). Beyond nouns, children can also infer some aspects of verb meaning based on discourse context (Fisher, Jin, & Scott, 2020;Yuan & Fisher, 2009).…”

Learning through processing: Towards an integrated approach to early word learning

“…In particular, work on syntactic bootstrapping has highlighted the utility of considering how entire utterances link up to the oft-ambiguous world, confirming the importance of syntax in helping young children forge such links (Gleitman, 1990;Omaki & Lidz, 2015;L. Naigles, 1990;Fisher & Gleitman, 2002;Fisher et al, 2020;L. R. Naigles, 2021).…”

“…By the second half of year two, children are becoming word-learning aficionados. At this age, toddlers readily use others' intentions, syntax, and lexico-conceptual constraints to rapidly guide new word learning, and process utterances containing familiar words with increased efficiency (Baldwin, 1993;Tomasello, 2005;Fisher et al, 2020;McMurray et al, 2012). Considering which of these mechanisms is at play is a straw man, in part because our theories generally overstep the available data to pick between them.…”

Editor's Introduction: 2017 Rumelhart Prize Issue Honoring Lila R. Gleitman

“…Although syntactic bootstrapping is now widely accepted, questions still remain about its range of applicability and the specific details of how it works under a variety of conditions. Fisher, Jin, and Scott () take the opportunity to push a central assumption of syntactic bootstrapping: that there is a universal bias to map each noun in a sentence onto a participant role (i.e., an argument of the verb). They first review the support for the idea that very young children distinguish between a novel verb presented with one noun in an intransitive frame (e.g., "Mary pilks") versus the same verb presented with two nouns in a transitive frame (e.g., "Mary pilks John"), mapping the former to events involving just one person and the latter to events involving causative actions of one person on another (Naigles, ; Naigles, Gleitman, & Gleitman, ).…”