Development of the first-mention bias

Hartshorne, Joshua K.; Nappa, Rebecca; Snedeker, Jesse

doi:10.1017/s0305000914000075

Cited by 69 publications

(68 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…referring to the first-mentioned referent in a context such as Sally ran in front of Mary. She …) while adults resolve this type of pronoun quickly and proactively (Arnold et al, 2007;Hartshorne, Nappa, & Snedeker, 2015). Results like this raise questions about whether children have the processing capacity to quickly generate predictions from which they can learn.…”

Section: Prediction and Processing In Young Childrenmentioning

confidence: 96%

Learning to predict or predicting to learn?

Rabagliati

Gambi

Pickering

2015

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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Section: Prediction and Processing In Young Childrenmentioning

confidence: 96%

Learning to predict or predicting to learn?

Rabagliati

Gambi

Pickering

2015

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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“…Like adults, children omit arguments more often when their referents are given rather than new, or present rather than absent. Second, in comprehension, toddlers and preschoolers link ambiguous phrases such as pronouns with referents that have been recently and prominently mentioned (e.g., Hartshorne, Nappa, & Snedeker, ; Horowitz & Frank, ; Lidz, Waxman, & Friedman, ; Saylor & Ganea, ; Song & Fisher, , ).…”

Section: Counting the Missing Nouns: The Ambiguity Of Sentencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Developmental Origins of Syntactic Bootstrapping

Fisher

Jin

Scott

2019

Topics in Cognitive Science

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Children use syntax to learn verbs, in a process known as syntactic bootstrapping. The structure-mapping account proposes that syntactic bootstrapping begins with a universal bias to map each noun phrase in a sentence onto a participant role in a structured conceptual representation of an event. Equipped with this bias, children interpret the number of noun phrases accompanying a new verb as evidence about the semantic predicate-argument structure of the sentence, and therefore about the meaning of the verb. In this paper, we first review evidence for the structure-mapping account, and then discuss challenges to the account arising from the existence of languages that allow verbs' arguments to be omitted, such as Korean. These challenges prompt us to (a) refine our notion of the distributional learning mechanisms that create representations of sentence structure, and (b) propose that an expectation of discourse continuity allows children to gather linguistic evidence for each verb's arguments across sentences in a coherent discourse. Taken together, the proposed learning mechanisms and biases sketch a route whereby simple aspects of sentence structure guide verb learning from the start of multiword sentence comprehension, and do so even if some of the new verb's arguments are omitted due to discourse redundancy.

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“…Like adults, children omit arguments more often when their referents are given rather than new, or present rather than absent. Second, in comprehension, toddlers and preschoolers link ambiguous phrases such as pronouns with referents that have been recently and prominently mentioned (e.g., Hartshorne, Nappa, & Snedeker, 2015;Horowitz & Frank, 2015;Lidz, Waxman, & Friedman, 2003;Saylor & Ganea, 2007;Song & Fisher, 2005. Jin et al (in prep.…”

Section: Discourse Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

The developmental origins of syntactic bootstrapping

Jin¹

2019

KJDP

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Children use syntax to learn verbs, in a process known as syntactic bootstrapping. The structuremapping account proposes that syntactic bootstrapping begins with a universal bias to map each noun phrase in a sentence onto a participant role in a structured conceptual representation of an event. Equipped with this bias, children interpret the number of noun phrases accompanying a new verb as evidence about the semantic predicate-argument structure of the sentence, and therefore about the meaning of the verb. In this paper, we first review evidence for the structure-mapping account, then discuss challenges to the account arising from the existence of languages that allow verbs' arguments to be omitted, such as Korean. These challenges prompt us to: (1) refine our notion of the distributional learning mechanisms that create representations of sentence structure, and (2) propose that an expectation of discourse continuity allows children to gather linguistic evidence for each verb's arguments across sentences in a coherent discourse. Taken together, the proposed learning mechanisms and biases sketch a route whereby simple aspects of sentence structure guide verb learning from the start of multi-word sentence comprehension, and do so even if some of the new verb's arguments are omitted due to discourse redundancy.

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Development of the first-mention bias

Cited by 69 publications

References 40 publications

Learning to predict or predicting to learn?

Learning to predict or predicting to learn?

The Developmental Origins of Syntactic Bootstrapping

The developmental origins of syntactic bootstrapping

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