ArticleDevelopmental science2021
Familiar words can serve as a semantic seed for syntactic bootstrapping.
Article in Developmental science, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- A year of nouns from English-learning infants' daily lives: The SEEDLingS-Nouns dataset.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Early Production of Imperceptible Words by Infants and Toddlers Born Deaf or Blind.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- From Recognizing Known Words to Learning New Ones: Comparing Online Speech Processing in Typically Developing and Late-Talking 2-Year-Olds.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2023Article
- Rapid infant learning of syntactic-semantic links.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Learning Through Processing: Toward an Integrated Approach to Early Word Learning.Annual review of linguistics · 2022Article
- The Acquisition of Noun and Verb Categories by Bootstrapping From a Few Known Words: A Computational Model.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. But how do they learn which contexts are linked to which semantic features in the first place? We investigate if 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 60) can learn about a syntactic context from tracking its use with only a few familiar words. After watching a 5-min training video in which a novel function word (i.e., 'ko') replaced either personal pronouns or articles, children were able to infer semantic properties for novel words co-occurring with the newly learned function word (i.e., objects vs. actions). These findings implicate a mechanism by which a distributional analysis, associated with a small vocabulary of known words, could be sufficient to identify some properties associated with specific syntactic contexts.
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