USE OF SYNTAX IN VERB ACQUISITION

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The long-term goal of the research is to discover how the meanings of words are learned by young children; that is, how the child maps the sounds of language onto their meanings. This goal will be addressed by considering two problems the child faces in learning words: the induction and conflation problems. The induction problem exists for the acquisition of nouns and adjectives as well as verbs, and reflects the fact that the world from which the child discovers word meanings is rich and complex; so much so, that observation alone seems insufficient to determine the referent of a word. The conflation problem exists only for verbs, and derives from the fact that the patter of components of verb meaning that are incorporated, or conflated, into the actual verb differs across languages. The proposed studies will examine in detail another source of information for verb learning; namely, the syntactic structures in which verbs appear. Extensive investigations have revealed many regularities between syntax and verb semantics; these studies will explore whether and to what extent children can use these regularities to learn new verbs--a process termed Syntactic Bootstrapping. The primary questions to be addressed include: How deeply within the lexicon can syntax aid verb acquisition? The fact that many verbs can appear in several different syntactic structures in the adult language suggests another question: Do multiple presentations (a variety of structures each presented once as opposed to one structure presented several times) aid in verb learning? And finally, how and when are the regularities between syntax and verb semantics, which feed the process of syntactic bootstrapping, learned? The majority of these questions will be studied using a new language comprehension method, which allows us to investigate in some detail the linguistic knowledge of children as young as twelve months of age.