What does syntax say about space? 2-year-olds use sentence structure to learn new prepositions

Cynthia Fisher; Stacy L. Klingler; Hyun joo Song

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2005.10.002

What does syntax say about space? 2-year-olds use sentence structure to learn new prepositions

Cynthia Fisher, Stacy L. Klingler, Hyun joo Song

Department of Psychology

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

35 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Children as young as two use sentence structure to learn the meanings of verbs. We probed the generality of sensitivity to sentence structure by moving to a different semantic and syntactic domain, spatial prepositions. Twenty-six-month-olds used sentence structure to determine whether a new word was an object-category name (This is a corp!) or a spatial-relational term (This is acorp my box!). We argue that children rely on the intimate relationship between nouns in sentences and semantic arguments of predicate terms: Noting that a new word takes noun arguments identifies the new word as a predicate term, and directs the child's attention to relations among its arguments.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	B19-B29
Journal	Cognition
Volume	101
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2005.10.002
Publication status	Published - 2006 Aug

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This research was partially funded by NIH grant HD44458, and by the Research Board of the University of Illinois. We thank Renée Baillargeon, Jennifer Cole, Yael Gertner, and Sylvia Yuan for helpful comments.

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Language and Linguistics
Developmental and Educational Psychology
Linguistics and Language
Cognitive Neuroscience

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10.1016/j.cognition.2005.10.002

Cite this

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abstract = "Children as young as two use sentence structure to learn the meanings of verbs. We probed the generality of sensitivity to sentence structure by moving to a different semantic and syntactic domain, spatial prepositions. Twenty-six-month-olds used sentence structure to determine whether a new word was an object-category name (This is a corp!) or a spatial-relational term (This is acorp my box!). We argue that children rely on the intimate relationship between nouns in sentences and semantic arguments of predicate terms: Noting that a new word takes noun arguments identifies the new word as a predicate term, and directs the child's attention to relations among its arguments.",

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What does syntax say about space? 2-year-olds use sentence structure to learn new prepositions

Abstract

Bibliographical note

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

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