Abstract

Lidz also ponders the theory of syntactic bootstrapping by asking why it is that learners are considered to retain little of extralinguistic environments (i.e., their observations) during word learning, while being able to retain detailed representations of linguistic context, for example, the multiple syntactic frames in which a verb appears. Lidz argues that learners value syntactic information over extralinguistic context from the beginning of learning, consistent with syntactic bootstrapping as a key device for verb learning.