Understanding How Input Matters

Abstract

Studies under the heading of “syntactic bootstrapping” have demonstrated that syntax guides young children’s interpretations during verb learning. We evaluate two hypotheses concerning the origins of syntactic bootstrapping effects. The “universalist” view, holding that syntactic bootstrapping falls out from universal properties of the syntax-semantics mapping, is shown to be superior to the “emergentist” view, which holds that argument structure patterns emerge from a process of categorization and generalization over the input. These theories diverge in their predictions about a language in which syntactic structure is not the most reliable cue to a certain meaning. Experiments with Kannada speaking children and adults support the universalist view.