scholarly journals Familiar words can serve as a semantic seed for syntactic bootstrapping

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mireille Babineau ◽  
Alex Carvalho ◽  
John Trueswell ◽  
Anne Christophe
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Bootstrapping

scholarly journals Neuro-cognitive development of semantic and syntactic bootstrapping in 6- to 7.5-year-old children

NeuroImage ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 118416
Author(s):  
Neelima Wagley ◽  
James R. Booth
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Development ◽  
Syntactic Bootstrapping

scholarly journals The Acquisition of Language: Evidence in Syntax

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 85
Author(s):  
Jakov Proroković ◽  
Frane Malenica
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Generative Grammar ◽  
Construction Grammar ◽  
Syntactic Bootstrapping ◽  
Main Ideas ◽  
Two Sides

This paper aims to discuss the two main approaches to language acquisition and present the main ideas behind the nativist and the usage-based account. The concomitant argument between the two sides has been present in linguistics ever since the proposal of innateness was provided by the paradigm of mainstream generative grammar (Chomsky 1965). In order to contribute to the ongoing discussion, we will attempt to outline the main challenges that the both theoretical strands are faced with and provide an overview of syntactic evidence provided by linguists whose work was devoted to understanding the mechanisms of language acquisition. Our goal is to analyze the insights provided by the phenomena such as syntactic bootstrapping, poverty of the stimulus, multiple argument realizations and non-canonical syntactic constructions and argue that integrating these findings into a usage-based framework (Tomasello 2000, 2003 - 2009) or various instances of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995 - 1996, Fillmore Kay - Fillmore 1999, van Trijp 2016, Steels 2011, inter alia) provides a more plausible and comprehensive explanation of the processes responsible for language acquisition.

The Structural Sources of Verb Meanings

2020 ◽  
pp. 261-312
Author(s):  
Lila R. Gleitman
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
External World ◽  
Verb Learning ◽  
Syntactic Bootstrapping

This chapter presents the theory of syntactic bootstrapping. It shows fundamental problems with a theory of verb learning based solely on observations of the external world. It then shows how these problems can be overcome if those experiences are paired with information about the syntactic structure of the clause that the verb occurs in.

scholarly journals The Impossibility of Language Acquisition (and How They Do It)

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lila R. Gleitman ◽  
Mark Y. Liberman ◽  
Cynthia A. McLemore ◽  
Barbara H. Partee
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Argument Structure ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Research Community ◽  
Psychological Perspective ◽  
Syntactic Bootstrapping ◽  
Language Input ◽  
Answering Questions

This autobiographical article, which began as an interview, reports some reflections by Lila Gleitman on the development of her thinking and her research—in concert with a host of esteemed collaborators over the years—on issues of language and mind, focusing on how language is acquired. Gleitman entered the field of linguistics as a student of Zellig Harris, and learned firsthand of Noam Chomsky's early work. She chose the psychological perspective, later helping to found the field of cognitive science; and with her husband and long-term collaborator, Henry Gleitman, for over 50 years fostered a continuing research community aimed at answering questions such as: When language input to the child is restricted, what is left to explain language acquisition? The studies reported here find that argument structure encoded in the syntax is key (syntactic bootstrapping) and that children learn word meaning in epiphanies (propose but verify).

scholarly journals Learning, Memory, and Syntactic Bootstrapping: A Meditation

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-90
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lidz
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Bootstrapping

The use of multiple frames in verb learning via syntactic bootstrapping

Cognition ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Letitia R. Naigles
Keyword(s):  
Verb Learning ◽  
Syntactic Bootstrapping ◽  
Multiple Frames

Discourse and the acquisition of eat

1992 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-595 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Rispoli
Keyword(s):  
Surface Structure ◽  
Information Sources ◽  
Semantic Representation ◽  
Discourse Context ◽  
Syntactic Bootstrapping ◽  
Transitive Verbs ◽  
Verb Lexicon ◽  
English Verb

ABSTRACTEnglish has several classes of transitive verbs which can optionally appear without an undergoer. Despite their similar syntactic sub-categorization, there are at least three different semantic subclasses that allow undergoer omission. Information sources based on surface structure, for example, syntactic bootstrapping, cannot inform the child of the semantic representation of these verbs. The focus of this paper is the acquisition of a single English verb, eat. The transcripts of 40 children, who were audiotaped monthly from 1;0 to 3;0, showed that eat was the first member of this verb class to be acquired. Some 1276 eat sentences were analysed for the presence of overt undergoer arguments across levels of cumulative verb lexicon (CVL) size, and two discourse conditions: (1) UNDERGOER ACCESSIBLE and (2) OPEN (to undergoer omission). Results indicate that undergoer omission became associated with discourse conditions when CVL size rose above 75 types, at MLU approximately 2·4 and age approximately 2;3. This suggests that two-year-old children are sensitive to a relationship between undergoer omission and discourse context.

Prosodic and Syntactic Bootstrapping and Their Clinical Applications

1995 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa M. Bedore ◽  
Laurence B. Leonard
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Language Development ◽  
Explicit Instruction ◽  
Clinical Applications ◽  
Language Intervention ◽  
Speech Stream ◽  
Syntactic Bootstrapping

All theories of language development assume that young children must have some means of identifying the relevant units of the language they hear without explicit instruction from adults. Even if children are born fully equipped to handle abstract units such as phrases and verbs, they need some means of identifying which pieces of the speech stream are examples of these units, because such units are not structured in the same way across languages. In this paper, we discuss two solutions to this problem that children might employ, commonly referred to as "prosodic bootstrapping" and "syntactic bootstrapping." Following a discussion of these processes, their implications for language intervention are considered.

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

1995 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 827-837 ◽  
Author(s):  
Letitia R. Naigles ◽  
Erika Hoff-Ginsberg
Keyword(s):  
Verb Learning ◽  
Syntactic Bootstrapping

Children use syntax to learn verb meanings

1990 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Letitia Naigles
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Vocabulary Acquisition ◽  
Experimental Validation ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Verb Learning ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
Syntactic Bootstrapping ◽  
Syntactic Information

ABSTRACTVerb 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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