Familiar words can serve as a semantic seed for syntactic bootstrapping.
Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. But how do they learn which contexts are linked to which semantic features in the first place? We investigate if 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 60) can learn about a syntactic context from tracking its use with only a few familiar words. After watching a 5-min training video in which a novel function word (i.e., 'ko') replaced either personal pronouns or articles, children were able to infer semantic properties for novel words co-occurring with the newly learned function word (i.e., objects vs. actions). These findings implicate a mechanism by which a distributional analysis, associated with a small vocabulary of known words, could be sufficient to identify some properties associated with specific syntactic contexts.
['Babineau|Mireille|M|0000-0002-8946-7082', 'de Carvalho|Alex|A|0000-0002-2938-0049', 'Trueswell|John|J|', 'Christophe|Anne|A|']
D002675:Child, Preschool D006801:Humans D007858:Learning D011336:Probability D012660:Semantics D014825:Vocabulary
syntactic bootstrapping eye movements language development language processing word learning