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Semantics in Language Acquisition
Edited by Kristen Syrett and Sudha Arunachalam
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 24] 2018
► pp. 198–220

Chapter 9
The labeling problem in syntactic bootstrapping

Main clause syntax in the acquisition of propositional attitude verbs

| University of Rochester
| University of Maryland
| University of Maryland

In English, the distinction between belief verbs, such as think, and desire verbs, such as want, is tracked by tense found in the subordinate clauses of those verbs. This suggests that subordinate clause tense might be a useful cue for learning the meanings of these verbs via syntactic bootstrapping. However, the correlation between tense and the belief v. desire distinction is not cross-linguistically robust; yet the acquisition profile of these verbs is similar cross-linguistically. Our proposal in this chapter is that, instead of using concrete cues like subordinate clause tense, learners may utilize more abstract syntactic cues that must be tuned to the syntactic distinctions present in a particular language. We present computational modeling evidence supporting the viability of this proposal.

Keywords: syntactic bootstrapping, word learning, verb learning, propositional attitude verbs, main clause syntax, labeling problem
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Approaches to the labeling problem
  • 3.Our proposal
  • 4.Implementing our proposal
    • 4.1Base model
      • 4.1.1The competence model
      • 4.1.2The performance model
    • 4.2Implementing abstract projection rules and featural anchors
    • 4.3Learning algorithm
  • 5.Experiment
    • 5.1Data
    • 5.2Fitting
    • 5.3Results
    • 5.4Discussion
  • 6.General discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.24.09whi
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