Predicted errors in children's early sentence comprehension

Yael Gertner, Cynthia Fisher

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)85-94
Number of pages10
JournalCognition
Volume124
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2012

Keywords

  • Language acquisition
  • Syntactic bootstrapping

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
  • Developmental and Educational Psychology
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Cognitive Neuroscience

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