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There might be more to syntactic bootstrapping than being pragmatic: A look at grammatical person and prosody in naturalistic child-directed speech

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2023

Naomi HAVRON Open the ORCID record for Naomi HAVRON [Opens in a new window] ,
Alex DE CARVALHO ,
Mireille BABINEAU ,
Monica BARBIR ,
Isabelle DAUTRICHE  and
Anne CHRISTOPHE
Naomi HAVRON*
Affiliation:
School of Psychological Sciences, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel Center for the Study of Child Development, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
Alex DE CARVALHO*
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Psychologie du Développement et de l’Éducation de l’Enfant – LaPsyDÉ, Université Paris Cité, Paris, France CNRS, Paris, France
Mireille BABINEAU
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Canada
Monica BARBIR
Affiliation:
International Research Center for Neurointelligence (World Premier International Research Center Initiative; WPI-IRCN), Institutes for Advanced Study (UTIAS), The University of Tokyo; Tokyo 113-0033, Japan
Isabelle DAUTRICHE
Affiliation:
CNRS, Paris, France Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France
Anne CHRISTOPHE
Affiliation:
CNRS, Paris, France Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris Sciences et Lettres, 75005 Paris, France
*
*Corresponding author. Naomi Havron, School of Psychological Sciences, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel. Email: nhavron@psy.haifa.ac.il; Alex de Carvalho, Laboratoire de Psychologie du Développement et de l’Éducation de l’Enfant – LaPsyDÉ, Université Paris Cité, Paris, France. Email: alex.de-carvalho@parisdescartes.fr
*Corresponding author. Naomi Havron, School of Psychological Sciences, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel. Email: nhavron@psy.haifa.ac.il; Alex de Carvalho, Laboratoire de Psychologie du Développement et de l’Éducation de l’Enfant – LaPsyDÉ, Université Paris Cité, Paris, France. Email: alex.de-carvalho@parisdescartes.fr
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Extract

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.

Keywords

syntactic bootstrappinglanguage acquisitionpragmaticsprosody
Type
Invited Commentary
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 50 , Issue 5: Special Issue on Syntactic Bootstrapping , September 2023 , pp. 1074 - 1078
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

†

Joint first authors

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