Lexicalization in the developing parser

Abstract

We use children’s noun learning as a probe into the nature of their syntactic prediction mechanism and the statistical knowledge on which that prediction mechanism is based. We focus on verb-based predictions, considering two possibilities: children’s syntactic predictions might rely on distributional knowledge about specific verbs—i.e. they might be lexicalized — or they might rely on distributional knowledge that is general to all verbs. In an intermodal preferential looking experiment, we establish that, by as early as 19 months of age, verb-based predictions are lexicalized: children encode the syntactic distributions of particular verbs and use those distributions to make predictions, but they do not assume that these can be used for verbs in general. knowledge from specific lexical Our data suggests that syntactic knowledge begins with abstract categories and that lexically specific distributional information informs the development of parsing strategies, but not the knowledge itself. That knowledge is revealed when we take away children’s ability to rely on lexically specific knowledge, as in the current study.