Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Early word-learning opportunities are often highly ambiguous, with this problem being especially difficult for verbs. While a verb's syntax can help to identify the referent event from the environment, learners still need to contend with temporal and spatial misalignment between verbs and their referent events. Although children are shown to use syntax to infer verb meaning when there is initially no co-occurring referent event, it remains unclear what role syntax plays in verb learning across exposures in tandem with referential information. With three adult word-learning experiments, we showed that while syntax independently informed verb meaning in the absence of referents, it did not additionally constrain subsequent mappings when a referent was present. These results reveal both the power of syntax in cross-situational verb-learning–persisting across exposures –and its limitations–failing to supersede co-present referents.