Rapid infant learning of syntactic–semantic links

Abstract

In the second year of life, infants begin to rapidly acquire the lexicon of their native language. A key learning mechanism underlying this acceleration is syntactic bootstrapping: the use of hidden cues in grammar to facilitate vocabulary learning. How infants forge the syntactic–semantic links that underlie this mechanism, however, remains speculative. A hurdle for theories is identifying computationally light strategies that have high precision within the complexity of the linguistic signal. Here, we presented 20-mo-old infants with novel grammatical elements in a complex natural language environment and measured their resultant vocabulary expansion. We found that infants can learn and exploit a natural language syntactic–semantic link in less than 30 min. The rapid speed of acquisition of a new syntactic bootstrap indicates that even emergent syntactic–semantic links can accelerate language learning. The results suggest that infants employ a cognitive network of efficient learning strategies to self-supervise language development.

Preverbal infants’ sensitivity to grammatical dependencies

“…This end point represents the mechanism known as syntactic bootstrapping (Fisher et al., 2010; Gleitman, 1990). Even though the semantic seed hypothesis has been proven feasible based on computational modeling (Brusini et al., 2021) and recent experimental work with toddlers and preschoolers (Babineau et al., 2021; Barbir et al., 2019), no research has yet explored the earliest stage of the mechanism during which preverbal infants develop their sensitivity to the relationship between function words and familiar content words. Based on past work showing that from 6 months of age infants use familiar content words to facilitate the segmentation of co‐occurring words (Bortfeld et al., 2005; Mersad & Nazzi, 2012), we posit that these familiar words also make their immediate context more salient, which would heighten their sensitivity to grammatical dependencies.…”