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seeing a toy car in it she says car; taking i::'..'. the ear out she says out; putting it on the floor she says down. In the world at large these little remarks do not command much attention. But to people i interested in how children learn to talk, the first steps into language raise fas- :7' "? elnating and difficult questions. In this chapter, we are concerned with the enal puzzle of where children's early word meanings come from. Are they ' introduced through language? Do they reflect concepts that arise spontane~ -. ously through infants' perceptual and cognitive development? Do language ":.: and cognition interact to produce early word meanings, and, if so, how? ",..., The idea that children learn how to structure meanings through exposure to language is' usually associated with Whorl (1956). Whorf stressed that ':: languages differ in the way they partition the world, and he proposed that in learning the semantic categories of their language, children also acquire a 'world vie

The Indexical Hypothesis describes how sentences become meaningful through grounding their interpretation in action. We develop support for the hypothesis by examining how people understand innovative denominal verbs, that is, verbs made from nouns and first encountered by participants within the experiment (e.g., to crutch). Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that different syntactic constructions provide scenes or goals that influence the meaning created for the innovative verbs. Experiment 3 used reading time to demonstrate that people also consider possible interactions with the objects underlying the verbs (i.e., the affordances of the objects) when creating meaning. Experiment 4 used a property verification procedure to demonstrate that the affordances derived from the objects depend on the situation-specific actions needed to complete the goal specified by the syntactic construction. Thus the evidence supports a specific type of interaction between syntax and semantics that leads to understanding: The syntax specifies a general scene, and the affordances of objects are used to specify the scene in detail sufficient to take action. © 2000 Academic Press Key Words: embodied cognition; construction grammar; sentence comprehension; denominal verbs. How sentences are understood is a central question. Theories of sentence comprehension can inform work on parsing (e.g., Frazier & Clifton, 1996; MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg,

Psycholinguistic research has shown that the influence of abstract syntactic knowledge on performance is shaped by particular sentences that have been experienced. To explore this idea, the authors applied a connectionist model of sentence production to the development and use of abstract syntax. The model makes use of (a) error-based learning to acquire and adapt sequencing mechanisms and (b) meaning–form mappings to derive syntactic representations. The model is able to account for most of what is known about structural priming in adult speakers, as well as key findings in preferential looking and elicited production studies of language acquisition. The model suggests how abstract knowledge and concrete experience are balanced in the development and use of syntax.

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...

This paper provides a tutorial introduction to computational studies of how children learn their native languages. Its aim is to make recent advances accessible to the broader research community. and to place them in the context of current theoretical issues. The first section locates computational studies and behavioral studies within a common theoretical framework. The next two sections review two papers that appear in this volume: one on learning the meanings of words and one on learning the sounds of words. The following section highlights an idea which emerges independently in these two papers and which I have dubbed autonomous bootstrapping. Classical bootstrapping hypotheses propose that children begin to get a toe-hold in a particular linguistic domain, such as syntax, by exploiting information from another domain, such as semantics. Autonomous bootstrapping complements the cross-domain acquisition strategies of classical bootstrapping with strategies that apply within a single domain. Autonomous bootstrapping strategies work by representing partial and/or uncertain linguistic knowledge and using it to analyze the input. The next two sections review two more more contributions to this special issue: one on learning word meanings via selectional preferences and one on algorithms for setting grammatical parameters. The final section suggests directions for future research.

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Theories of categorization have typically focused on the internal structure of categories. This paper is concerned with the external structure of categories. In particular , it is suggested that many categories specify the relational role that is played by category members. To support this claim, the paper distinguishes between traditional feature-based categories, relational categories (which specify a relational structure) and role-governed categories (which specify that an item plays a particular role within a relational structure). After discussing the relationship among these types of categories, the implications of this view for the study of category learning and category use are discussed.

This paper describes a cross-disciplinary extension of previous work on inferring the meanings of unknown verbs from context. In earlier work, a computational model was developed to incrementally infer meanings while processing texts in an information extraction task setting. In order to explore the space of possible predictors that the system could use to infer verb meanings, we performed a statistical analysis of the corpus that had been used to test the computational system. There were various syntactic and semantic features of the verbs that were significantly diagnostic in determining verb meaning. We also evaluated human performance at inferring the verb in the same set of sentences. The overall number of correct predictions for humans was quite similar to that of the computational system, but humans had higher precision scores. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these statistical and experimental findings for future computational work. Introduction Ver...

Introduction There are currently two theories about how children acquire a language. The first is generative grammar, according to which all human children innately possess a universal grammar, abstract enough to structure any language of the world. Acquisition then consists of two processes: (1) acquiring all the words, idioms, and quirky constructions of the particular language being learned (by `normal' processes of learning); and (2) linking the particular language being learned to the abstract universal grammar. Because it is innate, universal grammar does not develop ontogenetically but is the same throughout the lifespan -- this is the so-called continuity assumption (Pinker, 1984). This assumption allows generativists to use adult-like formal grammars to describe children's language and so to assume that the first time a child utters, for example, "I wanna play", she has an adult-like understanding of infinitival complement sentences and so can generate `similar' infinitival c