Children use syntax to learn verb meanings

TLDR

Verb learning depends on observing real‑world contingencies, yet this alone may not fully explain vocabulary acquisition. The study experimentally tests whether children use syntactic cues to learn new verbs. The experiment presented pairs of actions with a nonsense verb in two syntactic structures, then asked children to choose the referent action. Children’s referent choices depended on the verb’s syntactic structure, supporting syntactic bootstrapping.

Abstract

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.