Rapid infant learning of syntactic–semantic links - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Année : 2022

Rapid infant learning of syntactic–semantic links

Monica Barbir
Mireille J Babineau

Résumé

In the second year of life, infants begin to rapidly acquire the lexicon of their native language. A key learning mechanism underlying this acceleration is syntactic bootstrapping: the use of hidden cues in grammar to facilitate vocabulary learning. How infants forge the syntactic–semantic links that underlie this mechanism, however, remains speculative. A hurdle for theories is identifying computationally light strategies that have high precision within the complexity of the linguistic signal. Here, we presented 20-mo-old infants with novel grammatical elements in a complex natural language environment and measured their resultant vocabulary expansion. We found that infants can learn and exploit a natural language syntactic–semantic link in less than 30 min. The rapid speed of acquisition of a new syntactic bootstrap indicates that even emergent syntactic–semantic links can accelerate language learning. The results suggest that infants employ a cognitive network of efficient learning strategies to self-supervise language development.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
Barbir-et-al-pnas2023.pdf (631.29 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origine : Fichiers éditeurs autorisés sur une archive ouverte

Dates et versions

hal-04293637 , version 1 (18-11-2023)

Identifiants

Citer

Monica Barbir, Mireille J Babineau, Anne-Caroline Fiévet, Anne Christophe. Rapid infant learning of syntactic–semantic links. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022, 120 (1), ⟨10.1073/pnas.2209153119⟩. ⟨hal-04293637⟩
3 Consultations
3 Téléchargements

Altmetric

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More