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Leveraging language specific information

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 June 2023

Laura WAGNER Open the ORCID record for Laura WAGNER [Opens in a new window]
Laura WAGNER*
Affiliation:
Ohio State University, USA
*
Email: wagner.602@osu.edu
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Extract

Meaning comes in different shapes and sizes. Content words like parrot and persimmon and perambulate convey some important – and very specific – kinds of meanings. But the kinds of meaning that syntactic structures encode are of a different sort. They are more general and abstract than those kinds of words, and they are linked to the underlying organization of language. The essential insight behind syntactic bootstrapping is that children can leverage the way that structural elements connect to abstract meanings to help them acquire the more specific kinds of meanings in the content words.

Keywords

Syntactic Bootstrappingscalar implicatureword learning
Type
Invited Commentary
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 50 , Issue 5: Special Issue on Syntactic Bootstrapping , September 2023 , pp. 1079 - 1081
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

Brown, R. W. (1957). Linguistic determinism and the part of speech. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 55(1), 1.Google Scholar