Elizabeth Swanson
Graduate Student, Linguistics
Member, Maryland Language Science Center
1417 E Marie Mount Hall
Get Directions
Research Expertise
Language Acquisition
Pragmatics
Semantics
Publications
Syntactic Bootstrapping
A review of evidence for syntactic bootstrapping in the acquisition of verb meanings.
Author/Lead: Jeffrey Lidz, Elizabeth SwansonIn syntactic bootstrapping, children draw on syntactic information to constrain their hypotheses about word meanings. We review evidence for syntactic bootstrapping, focusing primarily on the acquisition of verb meanings. For verbs describing physical actions, children can use the argument structure from event descriptions to zero in on the verb meaning. For attitude verbs, which refer to mental states, the syntactic distribution is informative about their semantics. By making use of systematic syntax-semantics correspondences, syntactic bootstrapping provides a foothold for word learning when cues from the physical world are underinformative.