It is proposed that children have innate knowledge of the links between syntactic and semantic categories and can use these observations to make inferences about word meaning.
For example, under semantic bootstrapping, learning word meanings to understand the difference between physical objects, agents and actions is used to acquire the syntax of a language.
The link functions to map semantic concepts of objects, actions and attributes to syntactic categories of nouns, verbs and adjectives, respectively.
[8] In his research, Brown demonstrated that preschool-aged children could use their knowledge of different parts of speech to distinguish the meaning of nonsense words in English.
The results of Brown's experiment provided the first evidence showing that children could use syntax to infer meaning for newly encountered words and that they acquired grammar and semantics simultaneously.
This led developmental psycholinguists like Lila Gleitman, who coined the term syntactic bootstrapping in 1990,[2] to argue that syntax was pivotal for language learning, as it also gives a learner clues about semantics.
Gleitman concluded that a narrowing of contexts, then contextual support were required for the blind children to learn verbs (in which they had no direct experience).
In Gleitman's example, it is shown how direct experience is rarely present, as events are not labelled with their corresponding verb words.
Wellwood, Gagliardi, and Lidz (2016) [15]— showed that four-year-olds can understand the difference between a quantitative or qualitative word, based on its syntactic position within a sentence.
In the Gillette et al. (1999) study[16]—, the researchers tested adults to see what difficulties they would face when asked to identify a word from a muted, videotaped scene.
[16] An early demonstration by Letitia Naigles (1990) of syntactic bootstrapping involved showing 2-year-olds a video of a duck using its left hand to push a rabbit down into a squatting position while both the animals wave their right arms in circles.
In later studies, this was exemplified by Fisher as she proposed that children can use the number of noun phrases in a sentence as evidence about a verb's meaning.
Thus, there must be something deeper going on that enables children to learn these verbs referring to abstract mental concepts, such as syntactic frames as described in a study above by Harrigan, Hacquard, and Lidz.
[13] Because children have no initial idea about the meaning or usage of the words, syntactic bootstrapping aids them in figuring out when verbs refer to mental concepts.
[20] Children will understand from the syntactic frame in which it was uttered that the verb for mental state, thinks, refers to Matt's beliefs and not to his grandmother's.
[23] In a 2010 study, Syrett and Lidz[24] show that children learn the meaning of novel gradable adjectives on the basis of the adverbs that modify them.
In the 2010 study, Syrett and Lidz showed children pictures of objects that could be described in terms of both relative and maximal GA's.
Compared to as lexical category words, functional category words were found to have the following properties: As mentioned above, the observation often cited by Gleitman and collaborators as the major empirical basis of the syntactic bootstrapping theory is the seeming insufficiency of contextual cues to explain blind children’s ability to learn the perceptual verbs look and see.
Steven Pinker presents his theory of semantic bootstrapping, which hypothesizes that children use the meaning of words to start to learn the syntax of their language.
She explains that simply observing objects and events in the world does not provide sufficient information to infer the meanings of words and sentences.
[29] Becker briefly introduces an explanation of subject/object identification that relies on statistics rather than syntactic categories, once the meaning of the verb has been established.
[12] Wilkins proposes a direct counterexample to Gleitman's example of /put/ and /look/, attested in the Central Australian Aboriginal language of Mparntwe Arrernte.
]While /are-/ 'look, see' shares the same three noun structure, it serves as an equal candidate for Gleitman's "transfer" type, losing the important context narrowing.
Losing this early distinction should lead the child astray, yet they develop the language just the same, therefore a more subtle difference than the argument frame must exist.
Due to the pervasive ellipsis in Mandarin, the number of NP's in a phrase is a weaker clue in mapping causation or non-causation of a verb.
They found that 8-month-olds have a general knowledge of word order specific to their language preceding their acquisition of lexical items or syntactic categories.
No significant differences were observed on standardized tests or language sample measures between the monolingual and bilingual DS groups.
[38] Factors such as different attentional demands,[39] stability of the referen[check spelling][40] and imageability [41] have been proposed to explain the noun advantage seen in young children's vocabularies.
As the rate of their successful syntactic bootstrapping did not differ on the fast mapping task, no evidence of an impact was obtained from the group analyses nor were there any advantages.
The major finding of this study was that there was no evidence that bilingualism negatively affects syntactic bootstrapping skills in children with DS.