User:Knowlin4/sandbox

Hey guys! Let me know what I can change in the groupme. Questions/suggestions for the page:

• The second paragraph of poverty of stimulus and acquiring abstract verbs should be in evidence for.
  • The PoS section can be switched with a topic on context or...?
• Should the bullet points under early abstraction be moved to evidence?
• Underneath evidence for, create subheadings called abstract verbs, acquiring syntactic categories, and acquiring adjectives. (For example)
• Do we really need the last line of the intro if we’ve defined it? We don’t have a source for it even.

   *I guess not. I'll take it out. -LiaK (talk) 21:19, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

• Under references, we need to add Gleitman, Lila R. to Source 1. I tried to do it but failed.
  • If we add it to source one, it'd be cited to "To learn words, children must make associations from novel words to particular objects and concepts in order to acquire verb meanings within their native language." Is this what you mean? I fixed it.

Plan for publishing content to Wikipedia

1. Decide unanimously on completed incomplete sections of the wikipedia draft. Move the completed headed sections first.
2. Move the introduction first, to establish what syntactic bootstrapping is.
3. Then move the History section to replace the First Appearance section. This will give us more time to work on the Logic and Evidence sections.
4. Put current "Underlying Representations" sections inside our "Logic of Hypothesis" section.
5. "Challenges to validity" has been edited and will be published under our "Evidence Against" section.
6. After these edits are made, we will move the Logic section, then the Evidence For and Evidence Against sections.

Introduction

Syntactic bootstrapping is a theory in linguistics which proposes that children learn language by recognizing the syntactic categories (such as nouns, adjectives, etc.) and structure of their language, then begin to interpret verb meanings from these observations. Learning verbs in one's native language can oftentimes be challenging because surroundings do not give specific enough context for word learning. To learn words, children must make associations between novel words from their input and syntactic categories in their universal grammar. This is the foundation for bridging gaps between syntactic categories and novel words. Once conclusions are made about a word's syntactic category, a child can then infer the word's meaning.

History

The first appearance of empirical evidence of syntactic bootstrapping as a theory comes from 1957 research done by Roger Brown. In his research, he demonstrated that preschool-aged children could use their knowledge of different parts of speech to distinguish the meaning of nonsense words in English. The results of Brown’s experiment provided the first evidence showing that children could use syntax to infer meaning from newly encountered words.

Roger Brown began the topic of syntactic bootstrapping unknowingly. Ever since then, linguists have been exploring this theory in depth. Brown's flagship experiment indicated that children use the grammatical position of a novel word in a sentence to help them infer its meaning . The data provided by decades of research has allowed linguists to identify crucial mechanisms that underlie the theory, which connects to language learning and the theory as a whole. Roger Brown is credited for his initial experiments that led linguists to this discussion of whether or not syntax was crucial for learning and word meaning. 

In 1990, Lila Gleitman later coined the term “syntactic bootstrapping.” This term was modified from Steven Pinker's first usage of the term "bootstrapping" in reference to semantic bootstrapping. According to Gleitman's definition, verbs are learned with a delay compared to other parts of speech. This is because the linguistic information that supports their acquisition is not available during the early stages of language acquisition. The acquisition of verb meaning in children is pivotal to their language development. Syntactic bootstrapping seeks to explain how children acquire these words.

Logic of Hypothesis

When children are presented with a sentence that includes an unfamiliar verb, they look to extralinguistic context clues to help them determine what the meaning of that verb is. Children need to make the correct associations between a new word and what it refers to, but their environments do not give specific enough evidence for children to associate words with meanings. Some researchers thought that cross-situational learning may help children to learn words, but Gillette et al. (1999) have shown that this is not the case. Rather, children use syntactic information, such as the position of words within sentences, to help them learn new words.

For example, a child hears the sentence, “The cat meeped the bird.” If the child is familiar with the way arguments of verbs interact with the verb, he will infer that "the cat" is the agent and the "the bird" is the patient. Then, he can use these syntactic observations to infer that "meep" is a behavior that the cat is doing to the bird.

Poverty of the Stimulus

The poverty of the stimulus argument indicates that the linguistic input children receive from their parents and surroundings is not sufficient to explain how children develop the extensive vocabulary that they do. Because the vocabulary input children receive does not match with the vocabulary they acquire, children must be using some other mechanism or linguistic factor, such as syntactic bootstrapping, to aid in learning words.

Landau and Gleitman found when studying the acquisition of the verbs look and see by a blind child that contextual clues appeared to be insufficient to explain her understanding of these verbs . They considered the possibility that perceptual verbs might be used more by the blind child's mother when talking about nearby objects, since the child had to touch objects to perceive them. However, perceptual verbs in the sample were not more common than other verbs when the child was touching or near to objects. Therefore, it seemed unlikely that the blind child learned look and see solely from hearing these verbs while touching objects. However, Landau and Gleitman did find that look and see were consistently used in distinctive syntactic frames, namely in contexts in which an object was near or far away, respectively. A blind child could use this difference in context to differentiate the two verbs, even though the child could not physically look or see. This is an example of a child using syntax to bootstrap her acquisition of verb meanings.

Early Abstraction

Children have a bias to abstract or generalize knowledge from a verb quickly, which is called early abstraction. Within their mental grammar, they must be open to abstract interpretations of vocabulary in order to learn new word meanings. For example, by using this bias, children have the ability to learn that nouns have syntactic roles in relation to the verb, such as being the patient or agent. They generalize and expand this concept to relating to verb categories and not to a specific verb. 

• Children learn about single words but are also able to use linguistic knowledge towards these words in abstract ways. Early Abstraction learners are able to use pre and post verbal nouns phrases to decide who is the agent and who is the patient. In the sentence, “Bill threw the ball” Bill would be the recognized as preverbal NP (instead of pre-threw) and the ball is postverbal NP (instead of post-threw). Using this knowledge as a guide, children learn verbs and some thematic roles. As this is happening, children transfer syntactic knowledge from these clues to learn new verbs.
• There is evidence that children use their linguistic knowledge in abstract ways that comes from syntactic priming. Children, at least 3 years old, can analyze sentences for their syntax in order to distinguish patterns and reuse it with different words. They were primed for the structure “Give me the book” (a VP containing two NPs), so they understood the same structure used with different nouns and verbs, such as “Show mom the toy.” However they had delayed understandings of unprimed structures, those ending in a prepositional phrase (Give the toy to me).

• Another piece of evidence supporting Early Abstraction comes from an experiment by Gertner involving toddlers who viewed two separate videos that represented caused motion events. Both videos involved one boy and one girl in different roles; in one case "the boy is kradding the girl" and in the other the roles are reversed. The toddlers watched longest whichever video matched the agent to the correct subject in the sentence they heard. Even while the children may not have known what the new verb they were exposed to meant they were able to decide that the actions of the subject were being done on the object in the sentence. Experiments using this same method have been done by Gleitman and Naigles to show that children are able to use mappings from syntax to Semantics to determine what newly learned verbs mean.

Evidence For Syntactic Bootstrapping

Acquiring syntactic categories

Numerous experiments show that children can distinguish between syntactic categories, including Fisher, Klinger, and Song (2006), Gillette et. al (1990), and Mintz (2005). More specifically, an experiment by Wellwood, Gagliardi, and Lidz (2016) showed that four-year-olds associate unknown words with a quantitative meaning when they are presented in determiner positions. For example, in "Gleebest of the cows are by the barn," "gleebest" would be interpreted as "many" or "four," a quantity. Yet children associate the same unknown word with a qualitative interpretation when the word is presented in an adjective position. In the sentence "The gleebest cows are by the barn," "gleebest" would be interpreted as "striped" or "purple," a quality. That children can distinguish between syntactic categories is significant because it shows that they could use this information to learn word meanings.

In Roger Brown’s original experiment, preschool children were shown pictures along with a novel word. The pictures would be associated with a novel verb mass noun, verb, or a particular noun. The children were asked to point out the picture corresponding with the novel word, “niss” “sib” or “latt.” The experimenters asked them for verbs questions like “Do you know what it means to sib?” and then “This is [a picture of] sibbing. Now show me another picture of sibbing.” More than half of the children who had to choose from verbs, mass nouns, and particular nouns chose correctly, indicating their ability to distinguish between syntactic categories.

Some linguistic properties that have been argued to be learned through syntactic bootstrapping might be aided through other means, such as Prosodic bootstrapping. See Gervain et al. (2008) for details on how children may use function words and word stress to acquire their native language.

Acquiring verbs

Young children gather facts about verbs that are unknown to them through the experience they gain in listening to language. It has been proposed that children exhibit a strong bias towards one-to-one mapping between nouns and participant roles in sentences. Because of this bias, children are able to use the number of nouns in a sentence as a clue to a sentence’s predicate-argument structure. To explain further, if a toddler hears a sentence that contains two noun phrases, they are then able to infer that there is a relation in that sentence involving two participant-roles. Children can use these observations about syntactic structure to determine the meaning of novel verbs.

Fisher (1996) found that 3 and 5 year olds associated the subject of a novel intransitive verb with the patient argument, and the subject of a novel transitive verb with the agent argument. Children were shown a video with an agent/patient relation (such as one person pulling another). When children were asked to indicate the subject of a novel verb, those that heard the novel verb in the frame of a transitive verb, e.g. 'She's blicking her' identified the agent of the action (the puller) as the subject of the verb. Those that heard the novel verb in an intransitive frame, e.g. 'she's blicking around' identified the patient of the action (the one being pulled) as the subject of the verb. This shows that children can use the syntactic context of a novel verb to determine whether the verb is transitive or intransitive, which can help them infer meaning.

Papafragou, Cassidy, and Gleitman discuss that different types of verbs have different grammatical requirements, which can help children learn how these words are used. Gillette et al. (1999) performed experiments which found that participants who were provided both environmental and syntactic contexts were better able to infer what muted word was uttered at a particular point in a video than when only the environmental context was provided. In the experiment, participants were shown muted videos of a mother and infant playing. At a particular point in the video, a beep would sound and participants had to guess what word the beep stood for. It was always a verb or noun. Experimental results showed that participants were correct on identifying nouns more often than verbs. This shows that certain contexts are conducive to learning certain categories of words, like nouns, while the same context is not conducive to learning other categories, like verbs. This gives evidence that syntactic knowledge is useful for the acquisition of words, which supports the theory of syntactic bootstrapping that children use observations of syntax to interpret word meanings.

Acquiring attitude verbs

Children must have a special way that they acquire the meaning of attitude verbs, which refer to an individual’s mental state. Words such as 'think' and 'want' do not have physically observable qualities. Thus, there must be something deeper going on that enables children to learn these verbs referring to abstract mental concepts. Here, syntactic bootstrapping steps in to help.

• Because children have no initial idea about the meaning or usage of the words, syntactic bootstrapping aids them in figuring out how abstract verbs connect to mental concepts. If a child hears the statement, "Matt thinks his grandmother is under the covers," three- to four-year-old children will begin to have a relative understanding of Matt's belief, whether or not the main statement is true. Children will understand from the syntactic frame in which it was uttered that the verb for mental state, thinks, refers to Matt and not to his grandmother.
• Gillette et al. (1999) show that mental state verbs cannot easily be identified when only visual context is available. Adults were showed muted videos of a mother and child playing, and were asked to identify the word uttered when a beep was sounded. In different experimental conditions, participants were given varied amounts of syntactic context, which they could use to identify the word. Results showed that the more syntactic context they could use, the better the participants were at identifying the mystery word. This shows the importance of syntax in inferring meaning of unknown words.
• Harrigan, Hacquard, and Lidz (2016) found that children's interpretation of a new attitude verb depended on the syntactic frame in which it was learned. In the experiment, children who heard the word 'hope' presented in the same syntactic frame as 'want' (i.e. followed by an infinitival verb) connected the new verb 'hope' with a meaning of desire. On the other hand, those that heard 'hope' presented in the same frame as 'think' (i.e. followed by a finite verb) made no such association between desire and the new verb, instead associating the novel verb with belief. This provides evidence that children use syntax to some extent in learning the meaning behind these sorts of abstract verbs.

Frames of 'Hope' (Harrigan, Hacquard, and Lidz 2016)
Frame	Sentence		Children's Interpretation
'want'	I hope	to be there.	association with desire
'think'		you will be there.	association with belief

Acquiring adjectives

When it comes to acquiring knowledge of adjectives, Syrett and Lidz (2010) found that children use similar acquisition methods as they would with verbs using syntactic frames. Only gradable adjectives (GAs) were used, those that can be tested on a degree of which property they carried. This includes big, dry, full, and tall. They were further split into absolute maximum standard GAs and relative GAs. Examples of adverbs used were completely and very. Adverbs were either proportional, like completely, or intensifiers, like very. In their results, researchers found that intensifying adverbs had a wider scope of use with adjectives than proportional adverbs. Use the sentences "The boy is young/wet" for example. The intensifying adverb, very, can easily be expected for all of these examples but the adverb, completely, would not be.

• The boy is very young.
• The boy is very wet.
• #The boy is completely young.
• The boy is completely wet.

They also found that adverbs aided in creating a frame for adjectives so that learners know to associate the meaning of the adjective according to specific adverbs. If children learn adjectives based off the contributions of adverbs and their combination within frames, then grammar would be significant for learning.

Evidence Against Syntactic Bootstrapping

Steven Pinker presents his theory of semantic bootstrapping, which hypothesizes that children use the meaning of words to start to learn the syntax of their language.  Gleitman (1990) counters Pinker’s ideas by asserting that context is insufficient to supply word meaning, as a single context can allow for multiple interpretations of an uttered sentence. She explains that simply observing objects and events in the world does not provide sufficient information from which meaning can be made. Pinker, however, argues that semantic bootstrapping and syntactic bootstrapping aren't conflicting ideas, and that semantic bootstrapping makes no claims about learning word meanings. He argues that since semantic bootstrapping is a hypothesis about how children acquire syntax, while syntactic bootstrapping is a hypothesis about how children acquire word meanings, the opposition between the two theories does not necessarily exist.

Pinker agrees that syntactic categories are in fact used by children to learn semantics and accepts syntactic bootstrapping, but argues that Gleitman applies the hypothesis too broadly, and that is insufficient evidence to account for all of Gleitman's claims. Pinker argues that while children can use syntax to learn certain semantic properties within a single frame, like the number of arguments a verb takes or the types of arguments such as agent and patient, there are serious problems with the argument that children pick up on these semantic properties from the syntax when a verb is found in a wide range of syntactic frames. Pinker uses the verb "sew" as an example:

Frames of "sew" (Pinker 1994)
(You) sew			Activity
	the shirt		Activity done to an object.
		for me	Creating an object for a beneficiary.
		out of rags	Creating one object out of another.

Pinker argues that the syntax provides information about possible verb frames, but does not help a learner "zoom in" on a verb's meaning after hearing it in multiple frames. According to Pinker, the frames presented above for "sew" can do nothing for a learner other than clue them into the fact that "sewing" is some sort of activity. Furthermore, Pinker disagrees with Gleitman's claim that the ambiguities in the situations where a word is used could only be solved through subcategorization frames learned through syntactic bootstrapping.

Response to Evidence Against Syntactic Bootstrapping

Some languages allow the noun phrase arguments of a verb to go unpronounced. This poses a challenge for syntactic bootstrapping. For example, it raises the question of how children could distinguish transitive verbs from intransitive ones via the syntax when the NP subject or object argument could be unpronounced. Lee and Naigles (2005) looked at Mandarin Chinese, which allows the null-realization of both NP and PP arguments. They found that despite Mandarin allowing ellipsis of NP arguments, transitive verbs which appeared in the corpus data were more likely to be followed by an overt NP than either intransitive or 'overlapping' (intransitive with a source or direction argument) verb types. This data shows that even when verbal arguments are commonly dropped, the fact that they are pronounced significantly more often with transitive verbs than with intransitives allows for syntactic bootstrapping to still occur.

Syntactic Bootstrapping (subwiki)

Syntactic bootstrapping is a theory about the process of how children identify word meanings based on their syntactic categories. In other words, how knowledge of grammatical structure, including how syntactic categories combine into phrases and constituents in order to form sentences, "bootstraps," or encourages the acquisition of word meaning. Children do not need to rely solely on environmental context to understand meaning or have the words explained to them. With this theory, children infer word meanings from their observations about syntax, and use these observations to comprehend future utterances they hear.

One of the earliest demonstrations of the existence of syntactic bootstrapping is an experiment done by Roger Brown at Harvard University in 1957. Brown's experiment was the beginning of the framework needed in order for the theory to thrive. Through his experiments, he showed that children acquire grammar and semantics simultaneously. This led linguists like Lila Gleitman, who coined the term syntactic bootstrapping in 1990 , to argue that syntax was pivotal for language learning, as it also gives a learner clues about semantics.

Evidence

A) Brown (1957) -- Children between the ages of three and five were shown various pictures accompanied by novel English words. The nonsense words included singular nouns, mass nouns, and verbs. Brown showed these pictures to a child and asked them to tell him which specific nonsense word the picture depicted; this data was collected as either a noun, mass noun, or a verb. When the novel words were repositioned within the sentence and the children were asked a question, they focused on different aspects of the image shown and adjusted their answer. For example, when Brown wanted the child to identify a mass noun, he would ask the children "do you see any sib", and the child would point at the pictured mass noun or noun indicating quantity. To identify a verb, he would ask "what is sibbing", where sib is just a verb stem. In order to identify a singular noun, he would ask "do you see a sib?" When children made guesses, they were correct more than half of the time. This shows that children are sensitive to the syntactic position of words, and can correctly associate a novel word with its syntactic category.

B) Landau and Gleitman (1985) -- Upon experimenting with both blind and sighted children, Landau and Gleitman found that these children all differentiate between look and see versus touch, despite the blind child not being physically capable of looking or seeing. All children were found to associate look and see with perception, and touch with exploration. That blind children were able to learn the meanings of vision-related words even though they do not have vision shows that they used syntax and context to infer the meaning of these verbs.

C) Papafragou, Cassidy, Gleitman (2007) -- Participants were asked to identify verbs within the context of a video. Papafragou et al had children watch 12 videotaped stories. 4 stories about the subject's desires and 8 stories that varied in the subject's beliefs and the framing of a novel verb. At the end of the tape, they would hear a sentence describing the scene but the sentence's verb was replaced with a novel word. Children were asked to respond with what they thought the word meant. Their responses were categorized 4 ways: Action, Belief, Desire, and Other. They found that action words were easily interpreted by children. However, false belief scenes with the complementizer phrase caused for children to respond with belief words more often. Results showed that participants in the experiment identified the verb most accurately when they could use both the video and sentence contexts. When it comes to attitude verbs, children are sensitive to the syntactic framing of the verb in question.

Example Responses from Papafragou et al (2007)
Categories	Action	Belief	Desire	Other
	Go, Take, Get, Make	Know, Think	Like, Want, Need	Be, Do

D) Wellwood, Gagliardi, and Lidz (2016) -- Showed that four-year-olds can understand the difference between a quantitative or qualitative word, based on its syntactic position within a sentence. In “Gleebest of the cows are by the barn,” the novel word “gleebest” is in a determiner position, and is inferred to mean “most” or “many.” In “the gleebest cows are by the barn,” “gleebest” is in an adjective position, and children infer it to mean “spotty” or another quality. These results are significant because they show children using syntax to understand word meanings.

E) Gillette et al. (1999) -- Researchers tested adults to see what difficulties they would face when asked to identify a word from a muted, videotaped scene. They found that adults had trouble identifying the word, especially verbs, when they could only refer to the scene. Their performance increased once they were given the syntactic context for the mystery word. These results indicate that word learning is aided by the presence of syntactic context.

F) Harrigan, Hacquard, and Lidz (2016) -- Found that children's interpretation of a new attitude verb depended on the syntactic frame in which it was Introduced. In the experiment, children who heard the word 'hope' presented in the same syntactic frame as 'want' (i.e. followed by an infinitival verb) connected the new verb 'hope' with a meaning of desire. On the other hand, those that heard 'hope' presented in the same frame as 'think' (i.e. followed by a finite verb) made no such association between desire and the new verb, instead associating the novel verb with belief. This provides evidence that children use syntax to some extent in learning the meaning behind these sorts of abstract verbs.

G) Waxman, S. R., & Booth, A. E. (2001) -- Children who heard nouns focused on the object categories and children who focused on adjectives focused on an object's properties and categories. This shows that children are sensitive to different syntactic categories and can use their observations of syntax to infer word meaning.

See Syntactic bootstrapping for more detailed explanations.