Propose But Verify

We report three eyetracking experiments that examine the learning procedure used by adults as they pair novel words and visually presented referents over a sequence of referentially ambiguous trials. Successful learning under such conditions has been argued to be the product of a learning procedure in which participants provisionally pair each novel word with several possible referents and use a statistical associative learning mechanism to gradually converge on a single mapping across learning instances. We argue here that successful learning in this setting is instead the product of a one-trial procedure in which a single hypothesized word-referent pairing is retained across learning instances, abandoned only if the subsequent instance fails to confirm the pairing. We provide experimental evidence for this propose-but-verify learning procedure via three experiments in which adult participants attempted to learn the meanings of nonce words cross-situationally under varying degrees of referential uncertainty.

On the Semantic Content of Subcategorization Frames

This paper investigates the relations between the meanings of verbs and the syntactic structures in which they appear. The investigation is motivated by the puzzle of how children discover verb meanings. Well-known problems with unconstrained induction of word meanings from observations of world circumstances suggest that additional constraints or sources of information are required. Five experiments are presented which investigate the hypothesis that the closer any two verbs are in their meaning, the greater their overlap should be in their licensed syntactic structures.

The Structural Sources of Verb Meanings

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.

Beyond Herodotus

Deaf children who are unable to acquire oral language naturally and who are not exposed to a standard manual language can spontaneously develop a structured sign system that has many of the properties of natural spoken language. This communication system appears to be largely the invention of the child himself rather than that of the caretakers

The Impossibility of Language Acquisition (And How They Do It)

This autobiographical article, which began as an interview, reports some reflections by Lila R. 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 first-hand of Noam Chomsky’s early work. She chose the psychological perspective, later helping to found the field of cognitive science. With her husband and long-term collaborator, Henry Gleitman, for more than 50 years, she fostered a continuing research community aimed at answering fundamental questions in the theory of language and its acquisition.

When We Think About Thinking

Mental-content verbs such as think, believe, imagine and hope seem to pose special problems for the young language learner. One possible explanation for these difficulties is that the concepts that these verbs express are hard to grasp and therefore their acquisition must await relevant conceptual development. According to a different, perhaps complementary, proposal, a major contributor to the difficulty of these items lies with the informational requirements for identifying them from the contexts in which they appear. The experiments reported here explore the implications of these proposals by investigating the contribution of observational and linguistic cues to the acquisition of mental predicate vocabulary. We demonstrate that particular observed situations can be helpful in prompting reference to mental contents, specifically contexts that include a salient and/or unusual mental state such as false belief. We then compare the potency of such observational support to the reliability of syntactic information. In tasks where children and adults hypothesize the meaning of novel verbs, we find that syntactic information is a more reliable indicator of mentalistic interpretations than even the most cooperative contextual cues. The findings support the position that the informational demands of mapping, rather than age-related cognitive deficiency, can bear much of the explanatory burden for the learning problems posed by abstract verbs.

The Emergence of the Child as Grammarian

Demonstrations of some young children’s awareness of syntactic and semantic properties of language are presented. Rudiments of such “meta-linguistic” functioning are shown in two-year olds, who give judgments of grammaticalness in a role-modelling situation. The growth of these abilities is documented for a group of five- to eight-year-old children, who are asked explicitly to give judgments of deviant sentences. Adult-like behavior, in these talented subjects, is found to emerge in the period from five to eight years. Possible relations of meta-linguistic functioning to other “meta-cognitive” processes are suggested. Résumé Cet article présente des exemples de la connaissance qu’ont les enfants des propriétés syntaxiques et sémantiques du langage. Les rudiments d’un fonctionnement “méta-lingui-stique,” peuvent être mis en évidence chez les enfants de deux ans qui donnent des jugements de grammaticalité dans une situation de jeux. Les auteurs ont examiné le développement de ces capacités avec un groupe d’enfants de 5 à 8 ans, à qui l’on a demandé explicitement de donner des jugements sur des phrases déviantes. Les résultats montreraient qu’un comportement semblable à celui des adultes apparait entre 5 et 8 ans. Il est suggeré qu’il y a des relations possible entre le fonctionnement “meta-linguistique” et d’autres processus “meta-cognitifs.”

Relations Between Language and Thought

In this chapter we consider the question of whether the language one speaks affects one’s thinking. We discuss arguments showing that language cannot be taken to be the vehicle of thought. We then review evidence from several domains in which language has been proposed to reorganize conceptual representations, including color, objects and substances, space, motion, number, and spatial orientation. We conclude that linguistic representations have significant online processing effects in these and other cognitive and perceptual domains but do not alter conceptual representation.

Turning the Tables

This paper investigates possible influences of the lexical resources of individual languages on the spatial organization and reasoning styles of their users. That there are such powerful and pervasive influences of language on thought is the thesis of the Whorf–Sapir linguistic relativity hypothesis which, after a lengthy period in intellectual limbo, has recently returned to prominence in the anthropological, linguistic, and psycholinguistic literatures. Our point of departure is an influential group of cross-linguistic studies that appear to show that spatial reasoning is strongly affected by the spatial lexicon in everyday use in a community. Specifically, certain groups customarily use an externally referenced spatial-coordinate system to refer to nearby directions and positions (“to the north”) whereas English speakers usually employ a viewer-perspective system (“to the left”). Prior findings and interpretations have been to the effect that users of these two types of spatial system solve rotation problems in different ways, reasoning strategies imposed by habitual use of the language particular lexicons themselves. The present studies reproduce these different problem-solving strategies in speakers of a single language (English) by manipulating landmark cues, suggesting that language itself may not be the key causal factor in choice of spatial perspective. Prior evidence on rotation problem solution from infants and from laboratory animals suggests a unified interpretation of the findings: creatures approach spatial problems differently depending on the availability and suitability of local landmark cues. The results are discussed in terms of the current debate on the relation of language to thought, with particular emphasis on the question of why different cultural communities favor different perspectives in talking about space.

What Some Concepts Might Not Be

A discussion of the difficulties of prototype theories for describing compositional meaning motivates three experiments that inquire how well-defined concepts fare under paradigms that are commonly interpreted to support the prototype view. The stimulus materials include exemplars of prototype categories (sport, vehicle, fruit, vegetable) previously studied by others, and also exemplars of supposedly well-defined categories (odd number, even number, female and plane geometry figure)