1. There might be more to syntactic bootstrapping than being pragmatic: A look at grammatical person and prosody in naturalistic child-directed speech
- Author
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Naomi HAVRON, Alex DE CARVALHO, Mireille BABINEAU, Monica BARBIR, Isabelle DAUTRICHE, Anne CHRISTOPHE, University of Haifa [Haifa], Laboratoire de psychologie du développement et de l'éducation de l'enfant (LaPsyDÉ - UMR 8240), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Université Paris Cité (UPCité), UFR Institut de psychologie [Sociétés et Humanités] - Université Paris Cité (UFR Psychologie UPCité), Université Paris Cité (UPCité), University of Toronto, The University of Tokyo (UTokyo), Aix Marseille Université (AMU), Laboratoire de psychologie cognitive (LPC), Aix Marseille Université (AMU)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), École normale supérieure - Paris (ENS-PSL), Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL), Laboratoire de sciences cognitives et psycholinguistique (LSCP), Département d'Etudes Cognitives - ENS Paris (DEC), Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-École normale supérieure - Paris (ENS-PSL), and Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
- Subjects
Linguistics and Language ,Developmental and Educational Psychology ,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology ,[SHS.LANGUE]Humanities and Social Sciences/Linguistics ,[SCCO.LING]Cognitive science/Linguistics ,General Psychology ,Language and Linguistics - Abstract
In ‘Being pragmatic about syntactic bootstrapping’, Hacquard (2022) argues that abstract syntax is useful for word learning, but that an additional cue, pragmatics, is both necessary and available for young children during the first steps of language acquisition. She focuses on modals and attitude verbs, where the physical context seems particularly impoverished as the sole basis for deriving meanings, and thus where linguistic cues may be particularly helpful. She convincingly shows how pragmatic and syntactic cues could be combined to help young language learners learn and infer the possible meanings of attitude verbs such as “think”, “know” or “want”. She also argues that, in some circumstances, syntax and pragmatics would need to be supplemented by semantic information from context – for instance, in the case of modals such as “might”, “can”, or “must”. We agree with Hacquard on the importance of the synergies between these different cues to meaning, and wish to add two other aspects of the input that might also be used by young children in these contexts. The aspects we describe can only be noticed when one analyzes concrete examples of what children hear in their everyday lives, something which Hacquard does very often in her work (e.g., Dieuleveut, van Dooren, Cournane & Hacquard, 2022; Huang, White, Liao, Hacquard & Lidz, 2022; Yang, 2022). Taking into account different cues for meaning would help the field go beyond current models of syntactic bootstrapping, and create an integrated picture of the synergies between different levels of linguistic information.
- Published
- 2023