Best paper award for Alexander and collaborators

Infants do not expect sentences to match thoughts in their structure.

The journal of Language Learning and Development has awarded its Peter Jusczyk Best Paper [of the year] Award to "Thematic Content, Not Number Matching, Drives Syntactic Bootstrapping," by Laurel Perkins *19, Tyler Knowlton *21, Alexander Williams and Jeff Lidz. Abstracted below, the paper shows that infants acquiring a language do not, contrary to a long history of prior claims, take the structure of sentences, intransitive or transitive, to match the valence of the concepts they express. The valence of the concept may be higher than that of the clause. This is the central result of the so-called Third Man Project, supported by an NSF grant to Jeff and Alexander (BCS#1551629), and developed through the work of several PhD students, especially Perkins, now faculty at UCLA, and Knowlton, now a postdoc at Delaware. 

Children use correlations between the syntax of a clause and the meaning of its predicate to draw inferences about word meanings. On one proposal, these inferences are underwritten by a structural similarity between syntactic and semantic representations: learners expect that the number of clause arguments exactly matches the number of participant roles in the event concept under which its referent is viewed. We argue against this proposal, and in favor of a theory rooted in syntactic and semantic contents – in mappings from syntactic positions to thematic relations. We (i) provide evidence that infants view certain scenes under a concept with three participant relations (a girl taking a truck from a boy), and (ii) show that toddlers do not expect these representations to align numerically with clauses used to describe those scenes: they readily accept two-argument descriptions (“she pimmed the truck!”). This argues against syntactic bootstrapping theories underwritten by mappings between structural features of syntactic and semantic representations. Instead, our findings support bootstrapping based on grammatical and thematic content. Children’s earliest inferences may rely on the assumption that the syntactic asymmetry between subject and object correlates with a difference in how their referents relate to the event described by the sentence.