Language Learning and Language Universals

This paper explores the role of learning in generative grammar, highlighting interactions between distributional patterns in the environment and the innate structure of the language faculty. Reviewing three case studies, it is shown how learners use their language faculties to leverage the environment, making inferences from distributions to grammars that would not be licensed in the absence of a richly structured hypothesis space

Thematic relations as a cue to verb class: 2-year-olds distinguish unaccusatives from unergatives

Previous work shows that children use syntactic information to guide their hypotheses about verb meaning. Bunger & Lidz 2004 demonstrated that 2-year-olds map novel unaccusative verbs onto just the result subevent of a complex causative event and novel transitive verbs onto the entire causative event. We present data from a new preferential looking study demonstrating that 2-year-olds map novel unergative verbs onto the means subevent of a causative. We conclude that the interpretation of novel verbs is driven not only by the number of arguments in a given syntactic frame, but also by the semantic roles played by those arguments

Kidz in the \u27Hood: Syntactic Bootstrapping and the Mental Lexicon

This paper explores the limits of syntactic bootstrapping and demonstrates that the use of syntactic structure to build verb meanings is constrained to operate only within \u27frame neighborhoods,\u27 i.e., complement types that antecedently share formal and interpretive features. The results suggest that inferences over change in number of arguments are easier than inferences over change in type of arguments. This kind of finding establishes the limits within which the \u27syntactic bootstrapping\u27 paradigm for verb learning can operate, and also has implications for whether we should think about the architecture of the lexicon in projectionist or constructionist terms

Hope For Syntactic Bootstrapping

We explore children’s use of syntactic distribution in the acquisition of attitude verbs, such as think, want, and hope. Because attitude verbs refer to concepts that are opaque to observation but have syntactic distributions predictive of semantic properties, we hypothesize that syntax may serve as an important cue to learning their meanings. Using a novel methodology, we replicate previous literature showing an asymmetry between acquisition of think and want, and we additionally demonstrate that interpretation of a less frequent attitude verb, hope, patterns with type of syntactic complement. This supports the view that children treat syntactic frame as informative about an attitude verb’s meaning

Three-Year-Olds\u27 Understanding of Desire Reports Is Robust to Conflict

In this paper, we present two experiments with 3-year-olds, exploring their interpretation of sentences about desires. A mature concept of desire entails that desires may conflict with reality and that different people may have conflicting desires. While previous literature is suggestive, it remains unclear whether young children understand that (a) agents can have counterfactual desires about current states of affairs and (b) agents can have desires that conflict with one\u27s own desires or the desires of others. In this article, we test preschoolers\u27 interpretation of want sentences, in order to better understand their ability to represent conflicting desires, and to interpret sentences reporting these desires. In the first experiment, we use a truth-value judgment task (TVJT) to assess 3-year-olds\u27 understanding of want sentences when the subject of the sentence has a desire that conflicts with reality. In the second experiment, we use a game task to induce desires in the child that conflict with the desires of a competitor, and assess their understanding of sentences describing these desires. In both experiments, we find that 3-year-olds successfully interpret want sentences, suggesting that their ability to represent conflicting desires is adult-like at this age. Given that 3-year-olds generally display difficulty attributing beliefs to others that conflict with reality or with the child\u27s own beliefs, these findings may further cast some doubt on the view that children\u27s persistent difficulty with belief (think) is caused by these kinds of conflicts