Syntactic bootstrapping
Syntactic bootstrapping is a theory that proposes that verbs, presented in their syntactic frames, provide a source of information about their meaning.[1] When children are presented with a sentence that includes an unfamiliar verb, they look to extralinguistic context clues to help them in determining what the definition of that verb is.[1] According to Gleitman’s definition of syntactic bootstrapping coined in 1990, verbs are learned with a delay because the linguistic information that supports their acquisition is not available during the early stages of language acquisition. This would seem to show the importance of early acquisition of verb meaning in children is pivotal to language development.
The first appearance of empirical evidence of syntactic bootstrapping comes from research done by Roger Brown in 1957. In his research he showed that "preschool-aged children selected different aspects of a picture as the meaning of the novel word zup depending on whether he had told them this is a zup, this is some zup, or this is zupping."[2] This research by Roger Brown provided the first evidence showing that children could use syntax to infer meaning from newly encountered words. Evidence for the theory of syntactic bootstrapping is provided by many researchers across a broad timeframe and is continually being augmented to meet new standards. The evidence provided through this research has identified mechanisms that underlie the theory and syntactic bootstrapping and give weight to the theory.
While research on syntactic bootstrapping does provide an explanation for how young children can infer meaning from sentences due to their understanding of syntax, it does not provide a complete universal understanding of word learning theory and thus cannot be a universal theory. What the theory of syntactic bootstrapping does provide is an understanding of how children can use syntax to narrow down the possible meanings of words they encounter.
First appearance
The first evidence provided for the theory of syntactic bootstrapping comes from work by Roger Brown in 1957. He proposed a theory that stated that children might "use the part-of-speech membership of a new word as a first clue to its meaning."[3] Through his work Brown was able to conclude that children were sensitive to syntax when determining the meaning of a new word. In this same research Brown discovered that children found in sentences the verb referring to the action, the count noun referring to the object, and the mass noun as referring to the substance in sentences.[3] Brown's initial findings that supported what was later to be termed syntactic bootstrapping have led many researchers, most notably Gleitman and Naigles.
Evidence
Two pieces of evidence are provided for the existence of syntactic bootstrapping. Verb syntax and verb meaning have been shown to be related by research in linguistics by Bowerman, Fisher, Gleitman, Jackendoff, Levin, Naigles, and Pinker which provides the first piece of evidence for syntactic bootstrapping. This combined research has shown that verbs with different meanings have different syntactic privileges of occurrence.[1] The second piece of evidence provided for syntactic bootstrapping comes from research by Naigles and Kako. This research asserts that through experimental research children have demonstrated that they make use of syntax to provide them clues in verb meaning. For example, research with 2 year olds using sentences with nonsense-verbs has shown that they interpret those verb meanings using the sentence frame in which the verb was presented.[1]
Underlying representation and mechanisms
- Early Abstraction: Biases present in children cause them to represent abstract mental vocabularies and this causes "rapid generalization of newly acquired syntactic knowledge to new verbs."[4]
- Children are able to learn about single words but are also able to use linguistic knowledge in abstract ways. Early Abstraction learners are able to use pre and post verbal nouns to decide who is the agent and who is the patient(for example thrower and catcher) in a given sentence. Using this knowledge as a guide children are able to decide who is the agent and who is the patient in sentences and then transfer syntactic knowledge from these clues to learn new verbs.[4]
- Another piece of evidence supporting Early Abstraction comes from an experiment by Gertner() involving toddlers who viewed two separate videos that represented caused motion events.[6] Both videos involved one boy and one girl in different roles; in one case the boy is kradding the girl and in the other the roles are reversed[6] The toddlers watched longest whichever video matched the agent to the correct subject in the sentence they heard. Even while the children may not have known what the new verb they were exposed to meant they were able to decide that the actions of the subject were being done on the object in the sentence.[6] Experiments using this same method have been done by Gleitman and Naigles to show that children are able to use mappings from syntax to Semantics to determine what newly learned verbs mean.[3]
2) Independent Encoding of Syntactic Structure: Young children gather facts about verbs that are unknown to them through the experience they gain in listening to language.[4]
- Using semantic structure children are able to decide whether a sentence is transitive(two participant roles) or intransitive(one participant role) but this information only tells them the who the agent and object are in a sentence and does not help with interpreting the verb. Along with this information children can combine new syntactic structure information about newly encountered verbs to determine their semantic content.[4] In short children are able to combine factors involving agent and subject along with nouns and their placement in a sentence to interpret new verbs.
3) Structure-Mapping: "Syntactic bootstrapping originates in an unlearned bias toward one-to-one mapping between referential terms in sentences and semantic arguments of predicate terms."[4]
- It has been proposed that children exhibit a strong bias towards one-to-one mapping between nouns and participant roles in sentences.[4] Because of this bias children are able to use the number of nouns in a sentence as a clue to a sentences predicate-argument structure.[4] To explain further, if a toddler hears a sentence that contains two nouns they are then able to infer that there is a relation in that sentence involving two participant-roles.[4]
Challenges to the validity of syntactic bootstrapping across languages
While the theory of syntactic bootstrapping has strong support in the English language, there is still the question of how well it stands with other languages across the world that have other semantic and syntactic rules.
The first challenge comes from the question of how syntactic bootstrapping works in languages that do not use "argument."[7] The answer to this challenge comes from research on the Mandarin Chinese Language.[7] First it was found that while using informative Syntactic frames the verbs used were able to provide the necessary information to work out the context of the sentences provided to the participants. Secondly the frames used in this study were found to "cue the appropriate class of verbs."[7] This means that children using Mandarin Chinese can use context clues from the Syntactic frames they are presented to decide what "class" the verb they are hearing belongs to and thus attribute more accurate meaning to that verb, this is syntactic bootstrapping. Lastly it was found that sentence frames that are used in Mandarin, but not English, and these frames were found to correspond with "new" subclasses of verbs.[2]
The second challenge asks how a Syntactic frame used in a given language works when that specific frame can have multiple meanings. The answer to this challenge comes from findings that these frames can have general meanings that are stable across languages and not just specifically English. Once again the language speakers can infer from context clues as to the meaning of the verbs in the Syntactic frames presented.[2]
The third challenge deals with "how the meanings of language-specific morphosyntactic patterns might be acquired." The answer to this problem is that children have the ability to learn some verbs without Syntactic information.[2]
See also
Notes
- 1 2 3 4 .Chierchia, G. (1994). Syntactic bootstrapping & the acquisition of noun meanings: The mass-count issue. In B. Lust, M. Suner, J. Whitman, B. Lust, M. Suner, J. Whitman (Eds.), Syntactic theory & first language acquisition: Cross-linguistic perspectives, Vol. 1: Heads, projections, & learnability (pp. 301–318). Hillsdale, NJ England: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
- 1 2 3 4 Hoff, Erika & Shatz, Marilyn. (2009). Blackwell Handbook of Language Development. John Wiley & Sons.
- 1 2 3 Gernsbacher, Morton Ann. (Eds.). (1994). Handbook of Psycholinguistics. San Diego: Academic Press.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Fisher, Cynthia, Gertner, Yael, Scott, Rose M., & Yuan, Sylvia. (2010). syntactic bootstrapping. WIREs Cognitive Science, Vol. 1(March/April). Retrieved from http://babylab.berkeley.edu/SylviaYuan/papers/Fisher_etal_2010.pdf
- 1 2 Goldin-Meadow S. The Resilience of Language. New York: Psychology Press; 2003.
- 1 2 3 Gertner Y, Fisher C, Eisengart J. Learning words and rules: abstract knowledge of word order in early sentence comprehension. Psychol Sci 2006, 17:684–691.
- 1 2 3 Lee, J. N., & Naigles, L. R. (2005). The Input to Verb Learning in Mandarin Chinese: A Role for syntactic bootstrapping. Developmental Psychology, 41(3), 529-540. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.41.3.529