Assignment 3: Verb Learning

Posted Tuesday 9/30, due Thursday 10/9.

1. Summarize what a child can (and cannot) learn about verb meanings using Gleitman's "Syntactic Bootstrapping" approach.

2. Is there anything extra that a child could learn using Pinker's "Semantic Boostrapping" approach? Explain.

3. Are these two approaches incompatible with one another, or could they be usefully combined? Justify your answer.

Reading guidelines. All three of the assigned readings on this topic are relevant to this assignment, but you should look in particular at the following: Pinker pp.383-388, pp.395-403, Gleitman pp.23 onwards (part II).