Now in
Language Learning & Development from
Alexis '14,
Annie '12 and
Jeff, "
Syntactic and Lexical Inference in the Acquisition of Novel Superlatives." This paper argues, based on several word-learning tasks with 4-year-olds, that a “syntactic bootstrapping” hypothesis correctly predicts a bias toward quantity-based interpretations of a novel word appears in the syntactic position of a determiner, but also leaves open the explanation of a bias towards quality-based interpretations when the same word is in the syntactic position of an adjective. It then gives four computational models that differentially encode how lexical, conceptual, and perceptual factors could generate the latter bias, and concludes that it most likely results from a combination of lexical bias and perceptual encoding.
