ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Rapid infant learning of syntactic-semantic links.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Rethinking the Origins of Cross-Language Effects: How Heard Verbs Influence Japanese- and English-Speaking Children's Attention to the Details of Actions.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Associating everything with everything else, all at once: Semantic associations facilitate visual working memory formation for real-world objects.Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2025Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
In the second year of life, infants begin to rapidly acquire the lexicon of their native language. A key learning mechanism underlying this acceleration is syntactic bootstrapping: the use of hidden cues in grammar to facilitate vocabulary learning. How infants forge the syntactic-semantic links that underlie this mechanism, however, remains speculative. A hurdle for theories is identifying computationally light strategies that have high precision within the complexity of the linguistic signal. Here, we presented 20-mo-old infants with novel grammatical elements in a complex natural language environment and measured their resultant vocabulary expansion. We found that infants can learn and exploit a natural language syntactic-semantic link in less than 30 min. The rapid speed of acquisition of a new syntactic bootstrap indicates that even emergent syntactic-semantic links can accelerate language learning. The results suggest that infants employ a cognitive network of efficient learning strategies to self-supervise language development.
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