Does sentence structure boost early word learning?: An artifical language learning study
van den Eva Bemd, Maria Mos, Afra Alishahi, Shakıla Shayan · Research portal (Tilburg University) · 2014
Many studies show that structural information in a sentence is used as an information source to find the meaning of a novel word in that sentence, a phenomenon known as syntactic bootstrapping (Gleitman, 1990).However, no research thus far has investigated the use of structural cues in the first stages of learning a new language, when both word and structure knowledge are still in development.We conducted an artificial language learning experiment to investigate the interaction between learning word meaning and sentence structure.Participants watched animated scenes while hearing a three-word sentence describing the scene, and were subsequently tested on their linguistic knowledge.Results show that some, but not all participants were able to uncover the word meanings and the underlying sentence structure, and that knowledge of the structure may start to boost vocabulary learning in a later learning phase, which would be in line with the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis.Follow-up studies are conducted to corroborate these preliminary results.