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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2009
Verb learning is clearly a function of observation of real-world contingencies; however, it is argued that such observational information is insufficient to account fully for vocabulary acquisition. This paper provides an experimental validation of Landau & Gleitman's (1985) syntactic bootstrapping procedure; namely, that children may use syntactic information to learn new verbs. Pairs of actions were presented simultaneously with a nonsense verb in one of two syntactic structures. The actions were subsequently separated, and the children (MA = 2;1) were asked to select which action was the referent for the verb. The children's choice of referent was found to be a function of the syntactic structure in which the verb had appeared.
This research was supported by a predoctoral fellowship from the American Association of University Women to the author while at the University of Pennsylvania. I am grateful to Lila Gleitman for directing this research, to the Temple University Infant Language Lab, directed by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, which provided laboratory facilities and equipment, and to H. Gleitman for help with Fig. 2. Thanks also go to Richard Gerrig, Roberta Golinkoff, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Steve Reznick and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this paper.