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Sources of Variation in First Language Acquisition: Languages, contexts, and learners
Edited by Maya Hickmann †, Edy Veneziano and Harriet Jisa
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 22] 2018
► pp. 63–80

Chapter 3
Bootstrapping lexical and syntactic acquisition

| Center for Neuroscience in Education, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
| Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, CNRS, EHESS & Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University
| School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh
| Zukunftskolleg & University of Konstanz
| Center for Neurodevelopmental Disorders at Karolinska Institutet
| Laboratoire d’Etude de l’Apprentissage et du Développement, Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté & CNRS
| Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, CNRS & Université Paris Diderot
| Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, CNRS, EHESS & Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University & CNRS
How does language acquisition start? Having access to words and their meaning should help infants to learn about syntax, but learning about word meaning would be facilitated if infants had access to syntactic structure (Gleitman 1990). Phrasal prosody and function words may bootstrap lexical and syntactic acquisition. Infants have access to phonological phrases, and they use these to constrain the syntactic analysis of utterances by 18 months. At that same age, they can use function words to infer the syntactic category of unknown content words (nouns vs. verbs) and guess their plausible meaning (object vs. action). Moreover, computational work suggests that infants might be able to learn noun and verb contexts by generalizing from a small number of known words (the semantic seed).
Keywords: first language acquisition, word meanings, phrasal prosody, syntactic bootstrapping.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Phrasal prosody constrains online syntactic analysis
  • 3.Function words signal the syntactic category of the following content words
  • 4.Building a syntactic skeleton with phrasal prosody and function words
  • 5.Conclusions and perspectives
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 February 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.22.04bru
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