Two striking contrasts currently exist in the sentence processing literature. First, whereas adult readers rely heavily on lexical information in the generation of syntactic alternatives, adult listeners in world-situated eye-gaze studies appear to allow referential evidence to override strong countervailing lexical biases (Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995). Second, in contrast to adults, children in similar listening studies fail to use this referential information and appear to rely exclusively on verb biases or perhaps syntactically based parsing principles (Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill, & Logrip, 1999). We explore these contrasts by fully crossing verb bias and referential manipulations in a study using the eye-gaze listening technique with adults (Experiment 1) and Wve-year-olds (Experiment 2). Results indicate that adults combine lexical and referential information to determine syntactic choice. Children rely A portion of this work was presented in proceedings to the 23rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. The ideas in this paper owe much to our conversations with Lila Gleitman and to the comments of the many audiences who heard preliminary reports of this research. We thank Kirsten Thorpe for her assistance with testing, coding, and participant recruitment and Sylvia Yuan for her assistance in data analysis. We also gratefully acknowledge Tracy Dardick who carried out the norming studies and Jared Novick and David January who assisted in comparisons between head-mounted eye-tracking and our procedure. This work was supported by NIH Grant 1-R01-HD37507 to the second author and a National Science Foundation Science and Technology grant to the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania (NSF-STC Coo...

Abstract not found

How do children acquire the meaning of words? And why are words like know harder for learners to acquire than words like dog or jump? We suggest that a considerable part of the difficulty of acquiring the vocabulary of natural languages consists not in overcoming conceptual difficulties with abstract word meanings but rather in mapping these meanings onto their corresponding lexical forms. We sketch a theory of word learning that considers acquisition of the lexicon and of the clause-level syntax to be interlocked throughout their course, rather than distinct and separable parts of language learning. The machinery is set in motion by word-toworld pairing, a procedure that efficiently solves the mapping problem for a stock of concrete lexical items (mostly nouns), but only these. Armed with this basic stock of items, the learner accomplishes further lexical knowledge by an arm-over-arm process in which successively more sophisticated representations of linguistic structure are built. Lexical learning thereby can proceed by adding structure-to-world mapping to the earlier-available machinery. These further linguistic developments enable efficient solution of the mapping problem for the more abstract component of the lexical stock.. The outcome of this procedure is a highly lexicalized grammar whose usefulness does not end with successful learning. Rather, these detailed and highly structured lexical representations serve the purposes of the incremental multiple-cue processing machinery by which people produce speech and parse the speech that they hear.

Running head: vocabulary learning