TY - JOUR
T1 - Predicted errors in children's early sentence comprehension
AU - Gertner, Yael
AU - Fisher, Cynthia
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD054448) and the National Science Foundation (BCS-0620257). We thank Renée Baillargeon and Andrei Cimpian for helpful comments.
PY - 2012/7
Y1 - 2012/7
N2 - Children use syntax to interpret sentences and learn verbs; this is syntactic bootstrapping. The structure-mapping account of early syntactic bootstrapping proposes that a partial representation of sentence structure, the . set of nouns occurring with the verb, guides initial interpretation and provides an abstract format for new learning. This account predicts early successes, but also telltale errors: Toddlers should be unable to tell transitive sentences from other sentences containing two nouns. In testing this prediction, we capitalized on evidence that 21-month-olds use what they have learned about noun order in English sentences to understand new transitive verbs. In two experiments, 21-month-olds applied this noun-order knowledge to two-noun intransitive sentences, mistakenly assigning different interpretations to " The boy and the girl are gorping!" and " The girl and the boy are gorping!" . This suggests that toddlers exploit partial representations of sentence structure to guide sentence interpretation; these sparse representations are useful, but error-prone.
AB - Children use syntax to interpret sentences and learn verbs; this is syntactic bootstrapping. The structure-mapping account of early syntactic bootstrapping proposes that a partial representation of sentence structure, the . set of nouns occurring with the verb, guides initial interpretation and provides an abstract format for new learning. This account predicts early successes, but also telltale errors: Toddlers should be unable to tell transitive sentences from other sentences containing two nouns. In testing this prediction, we capitalized on evidence that 21-month-olds use what they have learned about noun order in English sentences to understand new transitive verbs. In two experiments, 21-month-olds applied this noun-order knowledge to two-noun intransitive sentences, mistakenly assigning different interpretations to " The boy and the girl are gorping!" and " The girl and the boy are gorping!" . This suggests that toddlers exploit partial representations of sentence structure to guide sentence interpretation; these sparse representations are useful, but error-prone.
KW - Language acquisition
KW - Syntactic bootstrapping
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.03.010
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.03.010
M3 - Article
C2 - 22525312
AN - SCOPUS:84861232821
SN - 0010-0277
VL - 124
SP - 85
EP - 94
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
IS - 1
ER -