Linguistics Seminar - Cynthia Fisher

Linking verbs with syntax: Distributional learning about verbs guides verb learning and sentence processing

Abstract: Learning a language requires balancing lexical and abstract knowledge, to learn patterns ranging from the idiosyncrasies of individual words to structures that can be generalized to almost any word. In this talk I will discuss the role of syntactic-distributional learning about verbs in creating and maintaining this balance. I will present evidence that, from early in acquisition, distributional learning creates probabilistic syntactic-semantic combinatorial knowledge about verbs and classes of verbs. This knowledge plays multiple roles in acquisition: (a) it permits syntactic bootstrapping, as children use each verb’s combinatorial behavior in sentences to help compute its meaning; and (b) it supports sentence processing (this is known as verb bias), by reducing ambiguity in online comprehension, and guiding sentence production.