Lexicalization in the developing parser
Aaron Steven White, Jeffrey Lidz
December 2021 

We use children's noun learning as a probe into the nature of their syntactic prediction mechanism and the statistical knowledge on which that prediction mechanism is based. We focus on verb-based predictions, considering two possibilities: children's syntactic predictions might rely on distributional knowledge about specific verbs---i.e. they might be lexicalized---or they might rely on distributional knowledge that is general to all verbs. In an intermodal preferential looking experiment, we establish that, by as early as 19 months of age, verb-based predictions are lexicalized: children encode the syntactic distributions of specific verbs and use those distributions to make predictions, but they do not assume that these can be assumed of verbs in general.

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Reference:	lingbuzz/006107 (please use that when you cite this article)
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keywords:	language acquisition, parsing, prediction, thematic roles, semantics, syntax
previous versions:	v2 [December 2021] v1 [October 2018]
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