Syntactic Bootstrapping in the Acquisition of Attitude Verbs

Tests of think required processing additional demands; including a conflict with reality, and a conflict with the child’s own mental state. In experiments 1-3, we test interpretation of want adding these additional task demands; and find that children are still adult-like in interpreting want sooner than they have reliably shown to be adult-like in interpreting think. In Experiment 4, we directly compare think and want in the same experimental context.

We still find adult-like behavior with want and not think. These studies demonstrate that the observed asymmetry between think and want reflects a real acquisition asymmetry, and is not due to experimental artifacts. After establishing in experiments 1-4 that the asymmetry between think and want reflects real acquisition facts, we explore children’s learning mechanism for attitude verbs in experiments 5 and 6.

We test children’s sensitivity to syntactic distribution in hypothesizing an unknown attitude verb’s syntax. In experiment 5, we find that children use syntactic complement to interpret sentences with a potentially unknown attitude verb. In experiment 6, we show that they integrate syntactic information into their semantic representation for this new verb; and continue to hypothesize a meaning based on syntactic frame in future experiences with the same verb.