Third Man paper published

Perkins, Knowlton, Williams and Lidz in Language Learning and Development

Now out in Language Learning and Development, the central paper from the Third Man Project, authored by Laurel Perkins *19 and Tyler Knowlton *21 with Alexander and Jeff: "Thematic Content, Not Number Matching, Drives Syntactic Bootstrapping." The paper, abstracted below, presents a series of experiments meant to test whether 20-month-olds expect transitive clauses to describe an event viewed as involving just two participants, as expected under one influential proposal. It finds that they do not, and argues that learners at this age instead expect only a correspondence in the content of the syntactic and semantic representations: for clauses describing actions, the subject/object asymmetry in syntax correspondence to the agent/patient asymmetry in semantics. This is the main result of the work done through the NSF grant to Jeff and Alexander, "Transitivity of Sentences and Scenes in Early Language Development" (#BCS-1551629), which over the years has involved not only Laurel and Tyler, but also Alexis Wellwood *14, Angela Xiaoxue He *15, Rachel Dudley *17 Mina Hirzel *22, and many RAs, as well as lab manager Tara Mease.

Abstract

Children use correlations between the syntax of a clause and the meaning of its predicate to draw inferences about word meanings. On one proposal, these inferences are underwritten by a structural similarity between syntactic and semantic representations: learners expect that the number of clause arguments exactly matches the number of participant roles in the event concept under which its referent is viewed. We argue against this proposal, and in favor of a theory rooted in syntactic and semantic contents – in mappings from syntactic positions to thematic relations. We (i) provide evidence that infants view certain scenes under a concept with three participant relations (a girl taking a truck from a boy), and (ii) show that toddlers do not expect these representations to align numerically with clauses used to describe those scenes: they readily accept two-argument descriptions (“she pimmed the truck!”). This argues against syntactic bootstrapping theories underwritten by mappings between structural features of syntactic and semantic representations. Instead, our findings support bootstrapping based on grammatical and thematic content. Children’s earliest inferences may rely on the assumption that the syntactic asymmetry between subject and object correlates with a difference in how their referents relate to the event described by the sentence.