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oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/78435 2023-07-11 col_2142_5131 col_2142_11614 com_2142_5130 com_2142_11613 com_2142_8903

Fisher, Cynthia L. Fisher, Cynthia Baillargeon, Renée Dell
, Gary Federmeier, Kara Brown-Schmidt, Sarah Jin, Kyong Sun 2015-07-22T22:17:13Z 2015-07-22T22:17:13Z 2015-05 2015-04-22 Children use syntax in verb learning; this is syntactic bootstrapping (Gleitman, 1990; Naigles, 1990). This dissertation proposal investigates two research questions about syntactic bootstrapping: 1) how syntactic bootstrapping could begin, and 2) how syntactic bootstrapping could work despite noisy input due to argument omission. The first three sets of experiments (Chapters 2) showed that 15- to 19-month-old infants use the number of nouns in a sentence to differentiate novel transitive and intransitive verbs. The results confirm a key prediction of structure-mapping account (Fisher, 1996) suggesting that syntactic bootstrapping might begin with an unlearned bias to assign each noun in the sentence to a core participant-role in conceptual representations of events. Experiments 4 and 5 (Chapter 3) showed that Korean-learning 2-year-old children exploit distributional and discourse information to find true number of arguments of a new verb despite pervasive argument omission. Finally, Chapter 4 (Experiment 6, 7 and 8) asked whether a bias to discourse continuity could aid children’s verb interpretation even in English that allows noun omission only in restricted situations. The results showed that English-learning children also could use discourse continuity to interpret verbs with missing subjects. Taken together, the results of these studies support the conclusion that the inherent one-to-one mapping bias can guide children’s verb learning even in noisy input in any language, with children’s expectation for discourse continuity. Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2015-07-22 without embargo terms The student, Kyong Sun Jin, accepted the attached license on 2015-04-20 at 21:59. The student, Kyong Sun Jin, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2015-04-20 at 22:09. This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2015-04-22 at 14:36. DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #7972 on 2015-07-22 at 10:33:01 Made available in DSpace on 2015-07-22T22:17:13Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 JIN-DISSERTATION-2015.pdf: 7222103 bytes, checksum: f8c562efe13388fb1223129cdc0f2b81 (MD5) LICENSE.txt: 4210 bytes, checksum: d2e462a5ce542c506c0a7885aebf193d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-04-22 application/pdf http://hdl.handle.net/2142/78435 en Copyright 2015 Kyong Sun Jin verb learning syntactic bootstrapping discourse The role of syntactic and discourse information in verb learning text text 2015-5 Psychology Psychology University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Dissertation Ph.D.