Month‐olds Exploit Verbs’ Syntactic Contexts to Build Expectations About Novel Words

During their second year of life, infants develop a rudimentary understanding of grammatical categories based on their knowledge and use of frequent function words. The current study inquired whether, at only 14 months of age, infants can track co‐occurrence patterns between function words and content words (e.g., determiners can precede nouns, and pronouns can precede verbs), and use these previously encountered syntactic contexts to build expectations about which function words can co‐occur with novel words. Using a habituation paradigm, French‐learning 14‐month‐olds were presented with utterances containing two novel words preceded by function words (either two determiners in the Novel Nouns condition or two pronouns in the Novel Verbs conditions). We found that at test, infants looked longer during trials in which the novel words occurred in an unexpected syntactic context (following a pronoun for infants in the Novel Nouns condition and following a determiner for infants in the pooled analysis of the three Novel Verbs conditions). Hence, our results confirm previous findings on infants’ sensitivity to noun contexts and most importantly demonstrate that their sensitivity to the co‐occurrence of verbs with pronouns begins much earlier than previously understood

Determiner · Grammatical category · Linguistics · Noun · Personal pronoun · Pronoun · Proper noun · Syntax · Child and Animal Learning Development · Computer Science · History · Language Development and Disorders · Philosophy · Psychology · Reading and Literacy Development · Artificial Intelligence

• Familiar words can serve as a semantic seed for syntactic bootstrapping

  Open Access•Mireille Babineau, Antônio De Carvalho et al.•Developmental Science•2020

  Incluir item

• Event end-state encoding in 13-month-olds—completed and non-completed events are different

  Open Access•Angela Xiaoxue He, Sudha Arunachalam•Language and Cognition•2024

  Incluir item

• Month-Old infants’ Use of Noun and Verb Morphosyntactic Cues in Novel Word Learning in Dynamic Events

  Yuriko Oshima-Takane, Yuriko Oshima‐Takane•Language Learning and Development•2024

  Incluir item

• Learning to predict and predicting to learn

  Mireille Babineau, Naomi Havron et al.•Language Acquisition•2023

  Incluir item

• Examining the roles of regularity and lexical class in 18–26-month-olds’ representations of how words sound

  Open Access•Charlotte Moore, Elika Bergelson•Journal of Memory and Language•2022

  Incluir item

• Modeling regularization in language acquisition as noise-tolerant grammar selection

  Open Access•Laurel Perkins, Tim Hunter et al.•Cognition•2026

  Incluir item

• Learning Through Processing

  Stephan C Meylan, Elika Bergelson•Annual Review of Linguistics•2021

  Incluir item

• Evaluating “Meaningful Differences” in Learning and Communication Across SES Backgrounds

  Open Access•Yi Ting Huang, Arynn S Byrd et al.•Annual Review of Linguistics•2022

  Incluir item

• The distributional and embodied contexts of verbs in caregiver-infant interactions

  Open Access•Vivian Hanwen Zhang, Lucas M CHANG et al.•Journal of Child Language•2025

  Incluir item

• Month-Olds Fail to Use Recent Experience to Infer the Syntactic Category of Novel Words

  Naomi Havron, Mireille Babineau et al.•2020

  Incluir item

• Month‐olds Fail to Use Recent Experience to Infer the Syntactic Category of Novel Words

  Open Access•Naomi Havron, Mireille Babineau et al.•Developmental Science•2020

  Incluir item

• Learning to predict and predicting to learn

  Mireille Babineau, Naomi Havron et al.•2022

  Incluir item

• The Acquisition of Noun and Verb Categories by Bootstrapping From a Few Known Words

  Open Access•Perrine Brusini, Olga Seminck et al.•Frontiers in Psychology•2021

  Incluir item

• Preverbal infants’ sensitivity to grammatical dependencies

  Open Access•Mireille Babineau, Anne Christophe et al.•Infancy•2022

  Incluir item

• Artificial grammar learning by 1-year-olds leads to specific and abstract knowledge

  Open Access•Rebecca L Gomez, Louann Gerken•Cognition•1999

  Incluir item

• The role of exposure to isolated words in early vocabulary development

  Open Access•Michael R Brent, Jeffrey Mark Siskind•Cognition•2001

  Incluir item

• The Structural Sources of Verb Meanings

  Lila R Gleitman, Lila Gleitman•Language Acquisition•1990

  Incluir item

• Human simulations of vocabulary learning

  Open Access•Jane Gillette, Henry Gleitman et al.•Cognition•1999

  Incluir item

• Infants can use distributional cues to form syntactic categories

  Open Access•Louann Gerken, R M Wilson et al.•Journal of Child Language•2005

  Incluir item

• Early verb learning in 20-month-old Japanese-speaking children

  Open Access•Yuriko Oshima-Takane, Yuriko Oshima‐Takane et al.•Journal of Child Language•2011

  Incluir item

• Syntax Constrains the Acquisition of Verb Meaning

  Savita Bernal, Jeffrey Lidz et al.•Language Learning and Development•2007

  Incluir item

• Prosody and Function Words Cue the Acquisition of Word Meanings in 18-Month-Old Infants

  Open Access•Antônio De Carvalho, Angela Xiaoxue He et al.•Psychological Science•2019

  Incluir item

• Functional Elements in Infants' Speech Processing

  Open Access•Barbara Höhle, Jürgen Weissenborn et al.•Infancy•2004

  Incluir item

• Syntactic Categorization in French‐Learning Infants

  Open Access•Rushen Shi, Andréane Melançon•Infancy•2010

  Incluir item

• Do 11-month-old French Infants Process Articles

  Open Access•Pierre A Hallé, Pierre Hallé et al.•Language and Speech•2008

  Incluir item