Learning to predict and predicting to learn: Before and beyond the syntactic bootstrapper

ABSTRACT

Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. This is syntactic bootstrapping. A learner that uses syntactic bootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semantic information that a syntactic context provides. Based on the semantic seed hypothesis, children discover the semantic predictiveness of syntactic contexts by tracking the distribution of familiar words. We propose that these learning mechanisms relate to a larger cognitive model: the predictive processing framework. According to this model, we perceive and make sense of the world by constantly predicting what will happen next in a probabilistic fashion. We outline evidence that prediction operates within language acquisition and show how this framework helps us understand the way lexical knowledge refines syntactic predictions and how syntactic knowledge refines predictions about novel words’ meanings. The predictive processing framework entails that learners can adapt to recent information and update their linguistic model. Here we review some of the recent experimental work showing that the type of prediction preschool children make from a syntactic context can change when they are presented with contrary evidence from recent input. We end by discussing some challenges of applying the predictive processing framework to syntactic bootstrapping and propose new avenues to investigate in future work.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Myah Meleca, Shelby Suhan, Anicole Tan and Yi Lin Wang for proofreading the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Infants also exploit the syntactic structure in which novel verbs appear to constrain their specific meaning—for example, mapping verbs appearing in transitive structures (e.g., “the girl is blicking the boy”) to causal actions (Arunachalam & Waxman 2010; Dautriche et al. 2014; de Carvalho et al. 2021; Fisher et al. 2010; Jin & Fisher 2014; Yuan & Fisher 2009; Yuan, Fisher & Snedeker 2012).

2 There is evidence in the literature showing that infants have already acquired a certain number of homophones around 20 months of age (see, e.g., de Carvalho et al. 2017).

3 Several languages, such as Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese, also have a classifier system used to signal the animate properties of co-occurring words (e.g., Adams & Conklin 1973).

Additional information

Funding

Some of the work reported in this publication was supported by postdoctoral fellowships to Mireille Babineau, one from the Fyssen Foundation and another from the H2020 European Research Council (Marie Sk#łodowska- Curie Grant No 799380), and postdoctoral grants to Naomi Havron from the French Embassy in Israel and the Victor Smorgon Charitable Fund. It was also supported by grants from the Fondation de France and the French ANR (ANR-13-APPR-0012 LangLearn, ANR-17-CE28-0007-01 LangAge, and ANR-17-EURE-0017 FrontCog).