American psycholinguist who developed the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis — children use the syntactic structure of sentences to figure out the meanings of new verbs — and made foundational contributions to language acquisition.
Syntactic bootstrapping: children cannot learn verb meanings from observation alone — they use the argument structure of verbs in sentences to infer their meanings. This requires innate sensitivity to syntactic structure. Language and Experience: the interaction of linguistic and perceptual learning.
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