Inferring Verb Meanings from Syntactic Frames by Japanese Two-Year-Old
Children: An Experimental Approach
Using an IPL Paradigm with a Dialogue Phase
TESSEI KOBAYASHI*
NTT Communication Science LabsTAKAAKI SUZUKI
Kyoto Sangyo University

1. Syntactic Bootstrapping
Syntactic bootstrapping is the proposal that children make use of syntactic
information to learn verb meanings (Gleitman 1990). Learning verb meanings is a complex and challenging task for children. Unlike nouns, verbs
refer to ever-changing events, and they often refer to only particular aspectsof the events, such as actions, manners, and states. At the onset of verb
learning, children need help to focus on the particular aspects that the verb
describes, and syntactic bootstrapping helps children in this regard. For example, the meaning of the verb gorp in the sentence The duck is gorping thebunny is inferable to some extent. Because this sentence consists of an NP,
a V, and an NP, the verb is considered transitive, and its meaning is likely
to denote a certain kind of causation. Although it is impossible to determine
the precise meaning of the verb, syntactic frames act as a kind of “zoom* We thank Kaori Yuruki and Tomoko Kawaguchi for their assistance with data collection andcoding, and Miki Terasaka for drawing illustrations used in this paper.
Japanese/Korean Linguistics 22.
Edited by Mikio Giriko, Kyoko Kanzaki, Naonori Nagaya and Akiko Takemura.
Copyright © 2014, CSLI Publications

1

2 / TESSEI KOBAYASHI AND TAKAAKI SUZUKI

lens” in directing the listener’s attention to certain aspects of the event(Fisher, Gleitman and Gleitman 1991; Gleitman 1990).
A seminal study on syntactic bootstrapping in young children was carried out by Naigles (1990), who used an intermodal preferential looking(IPL) paradigm to demonstrate that English-speaking 25-month-old children
are able to use sentence frames to infer a causative/non-causative distinction.
Her experiment consisted of two phases. In the training phase, children saw
a combination of two different actions performed by two animal entities,
one causative (a duck forced a rabbit into a bending position), and the othernon-causative (a duck and a rabbit flexed their arms simultaneously). The
children in the transitive condition heard a novel verb in the transitive frame(Look, the duck is gorping the bunny!), and those in the intransitive condition heard a novel verb in the intransitive frame (Look, the duck and thebunny are gorping!). In the following test phase, the causative and noncausative action scenes were presented separately side by side while thechildren were asked which action was denoted by the novel verb (Which isgorping?). Naigles found that the children looked preferentially at the causative scene for the transitive frame (NP-V-NP) and preferentially at the noncausative scene for the intransitive frame (NP-V), providing evidence that
English-speaking 2-year-olds can use syntactic frames to infer verb meanings in terms of a causative/non-causative distinction. The original finding
has been replicated in English using different methods (e.g., Fisher 1996)
and testing different frames (e.g., Naigles 1996).

2. Current Issues
To better understand the nature of syntactic bootstrapping, recent investigations have addressed certain important issues. One is whether syntactic
bootstrapping occurs in argument-drop languages. Previous studies on syntactic bootstrapping have been largely limited to English, in which syntactic
frames are highly informative about a verb’s transitivity because argument
NPs must be overtly expressed. On the other hand, in an argument-drop
language like Japanese, syntactic frames may not be a robust cue to transitivity. As the following examples show, argument NPs are frequently
dropped as long as their information is recoverable from the context or
shared by the speaker and the hearer. The transitive verb homeru ‘praise’
can be used in the following ways.
(1) Kyooko ga Saori ohometa.
Kyoko NOM Saori ACC praised‘Kyoko praised Saori.’SYNTACTIC BOOTSTRAPPING IN JAPANESE CHILDREN / 3(2) Kyooko ga hometa.
Kyoko NOM praised(3) Saori ohometa.
Saori ACC praised(4) Hometa.
praisedBoth a subject marked with nominative ga and a direct object marked withaccusative o appear in (1), only a subject appears in (2), only a direct object
appears in (3), and both the subject and direct object are omitted from (4),all of which are grammatical in Japanese. These patterns suggest that thesyntactic frames used for English-type languages, such as NP-V-NP and
NP-V, may not work well for identifying the transitivity of a verb. Thus,
children learning argument-drop languages may not be able to infer verb
meanings from syntactic frames (e.g., Rispoli 1995; Suzuki 2002).
To investigate this issue, Matsuo et al. (2012) examined Japanesespeaking 28-month-old children by adapting Naigle’s method to Japanese.
Using the same visual stimuli and procedure, this study tested three sentence patterns: the intransitive frame (Ahiru-san to usagi-san ga neketteru
yo ‘The duck and the rabbit are X-ing’), the transitive frame (Ahiru-san ga
usagi-san o neketteru yo ‘The duck is X-ing the rabbit’), and the transitive
frame without case markers (Ahiru-san usagi-san neketteru yo ‘The duck is
X-ing the rabbit’). The results showed that Japanese-speaking 2-year-olds
associated the sentences provided in the transitive frame with causative
events, but the other two types of sentences were not associated with any
particular events. On the basis of these results, Matsuo et al. proposed thatJapanese 2-year-olds utilize the combination of the number of overt arguments and case markers to infer the meaning of a new verb.
The data from other argument-drop languages are also informative.
Göksun, Küntay and Naigles (2008) and Lee and Naigles (2008) examined
Turkish-speaking 2- to 5-year-olds and Mandarin-speaking 2- and 3-yearolds, respectively. In an act-out comprehension task, the children were given intransitive verbs in a transitive frame and transitive verbs in an intransitive frame, and then were asked to act-out the scenes by using puppets andprops. The results showed that in both languages the children followed thesyntactic frames for the interpretation of the sentences, and ignored theverb’s original transitivity. These findings indicate early sensitivity to syntactic frames in children learning argument-drop languages, although it is
impossible to make a direct comparison with the original IPL studies inEnglish (Naigles 1990) because the Turkish and Mandarin studies used fa-

4 / TESSEI KOBAYASHI AND TAKAAKI SUZUKI

miliar verbs in their act-out tasks, and their participants included relatively
older children.
Another important issue in recent research on syntactic bootstrapping isconcerned with the availability of visual cues. Although traditional studies
on syntactic bootstrapping have shown action events visually in the training
phase when providing target sentences (e.g., Naigles 1990), such a procedure is unnecessary. The basic idea of syntactic bootstrapping is that syntactic information itself is informative about verb meanings (Gleitman 1990;
Landau and Gleitman 1985), and so children do not need visual informationin order to guess the gross meanings of a new verb. Arunachalam andWaxman (2010), and Yuan and Fisher (2009) have succeeded in observing
children’s syntactic bootstrapping in English by providing syntactic information alone in the absence of visual cues. In their “dialogue method,”children did not see an action event but instead saw a two-woman dialogue
scene in the training phase. In the dialogue, two women used a novel verb
embedded in a transitive or intransitive frame. Then, causative and noncausative action scenes were simultaneously presented in the test phase. The
results of both studies showed that English-speaking 27- to 28-month-old
toddlers looked longer or pointed more often at the causative action in thetransitive frame, providing evidence that children can infer verb meanings
from syntactic information alone in the absence of visual cues.

3. Aims of the Present StudyIn the present study, we investigated whether syntactic bootstrapping occurs
in children learning Japanese by using a dialogue method in an IPL paradigm. A critical issue here is to determine whether the children can inferverb meanings from syntactic information alone in the absence of visualcues. The syntactic information includes morphological or morphosyntactic properties such as case markers, and the position and the numberof argument NPs. In this study, we use the term syntactic bootstrapping torefer to the utilization of these aspects of the language. Our participants
were given two-woman dialogue-clips including a novel verb embedded ineither transitive or intransitive frames and asked which of the events shownin the two adjacent scenes (causative scene vs. non-causative scene) indicated the meaning of the novel verb. We predicted that if the children infer
the meaning of the novel verb from syntactic information alone during thetraining phase, those hearing the transitive frame should look longer at thecausative scene and those hearing the intransitive frame should look longer
at the non-causative scene in the test phase.

SYNTACTIC BOOTSTRAPPING IN JAPANESE CHILDREN / 5

4. Experiment4.1. Participants
Thirty-two Japanese-speaking children (16 boys and 16 girls) with a mean
age of 27.5 months (range: 27.1 to 28.7 months) completed this study. Four
additional children were tested but excluded from the present analysis due
to fussiness. All the children grew up in a monolingual environment where
they learned Japanese as their native language. They were recruited fromthe Kyoto area. Parents completed the Japanese version of the MacArthurBates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI): Words and Grammar(Watamaki and Ogura 2004). The mean productive vocabulary was 364.3
words (range: 72–621).
4.2. Apparatus and Stimuli
The children sat on their mothers’ laps in a dimly lit testing room (250 ×
250 cm) facing a 40-in. monitor about 150 cm away. Visual stimuli were
presented on the monitor using Microsoft PowerPoint installed on a Macintosh G4 computer. Audio stimuli were presented through a speaker locatedunder the monitor behind black curtains. A digital video camera was placed
behind a small opening in the black curtains, and about 3 cm below themonitor. The camera was connected to a 20-in. monitor and a digital video
recorder to record the direction of the children’s eye fixation and to allow anexperimenter in an adjacent room to observe the children’s behaviors.
Visual stimuli were created for the dialogue scene in which two women
were engaged in conversation with natural gestures, and for the causativeand non-causative scenes in which a man and a woman were engaged in
novel actions. The audio stimuli for the action scenes were produced andrecorded by a female native Japanese speaker in a soundproof booth, andthen synchronized with the visual stimuli using movie-editing software.
4.3. Design and Procedure
Sixteen children were randomly assigned to a Transitive condition and sixteen to an Intransitive condition. Within each condition, they were randomly assigned one of two novel verbs (nemaru or wageru). A session consistedof a dialogue phase, a baseline phase, and a test phase. All the children
completed two consecutive sessions.
4.3.1. Dialogue Phase
In the dialogue phase, the children saw a color video clip of two women
engaged in conversation (Figure 1). The dialogue video appeared in thecenter of the monitor (size: 26.1 cm × 46.3 cm). While the children in theTransitive condition heard the novel verb embedded in transitive sentence
frames (5), those in the Intransitive condition heard the novel verb embed-

6 / TESSEI KOBAYASHI AND TAKAAKI SUZUKI

ded in conjoined-subject intransitive sentence frames (6). Each trial consisted of a 17-second dialogue including the novel verb in four sentences(Table 1). The children saw the same video clip three times in succession.
At the end of each trial, the scene was blank for 3 seconds before the next
trial began.
(5) Tomo-kun ga Yuu-chan onemat-teiru / waget-teiru yo.
Tomo-Mr. NOM Yu-Ms. ACC verb-PROG
PCL‘Tomo is X-ing Yu.’
(6) Tomo-kun to Yuu-chan ga
nemat-teiru / waget-teiru yo.
Tomo-Mr. and Yu-Ms. NOM verb-PROG
PCL‘Tomo and Yu are X-ing.’
Table 1. Two-Woman Dialogues Including Novel Verbs in theTransitive Condition and the Intransitive Condition
Transitive Condition(N = 16)

Intransitive Condition(N = 16)

A: Nee nee.
Tomo-kun ga Yuu-chan onematteiru yo.
‘Hey. Tomo is X-ing Yu.’

A: Nee nee.
Tomo-kun to Yuu-chan ga
nematteiru yo.
‘Hey. Tomo and Yu are X-ing.’

B: E? Dare ga dare o nematteiru no?
‘Huh? Who is X-ing whom?’

B: E? Dare to dare ga nematteiru no?
‘Huh? Who are X-ing?’

A: Tomo-kun ga Yuu-chan onemattan yo.
‘Tomo is X-ing Yu.’

A: Tomo-kun to Yuu-chan ga
nemattan yo.
‘Tomo and Yu are X-ing.’

B: Honma?
Tomo-kun ga Yuu-chan onemattan ya.
Sugoi ne.
‘Really? Tomo is X-ing Yu.
Good.’

B: Honma?
Tomo-kun to Yuu-chan ga
nemattan ya.
Sugoi ne.
‘Really? Tomo and Yu are X-ing.
Good.’

A: Un, sugoi ne.
‘Yeah, I think so.’

A: Un, sugoi ne.
‘Yeah, I think so.’SYNTACTIC BOOTSTRAPPING IN JAPANESE CHILDREN / 7

Figure 1. Illustration of Movie Clip Used in Dialogue Phase
4.3.2. Baseline Phase
Following the dialogue phase, the children were given two baseline trials.
While the children in both conditions were watching two side-by-side video
clips, they heard an arousal phrase such as Mite-mite! (‘Look!’). One video
clip showed a causative scene in which a man spun a woman around on achair. The other showed a synchronous non-causative scene in which thesame man and woman each waved a hand in circles (Figure 2). The size ofeach clip was 39.2 cm wide by 22.1 cm high, and the two clips were shownwith a space of 10 cm between them. We chose this action pair because
Arunachalam and Waxman (2010) used the same action pair to provide
clear evidence for inferring verb meanings from syntactic frames alone.

Figure 2. Movie Clip of Causative Action (Left) and Non-causative
Action (Right) Used for Baseline Phase and Test Phase
4.3.3. Test Phase
The children were given two test trials in which they watched two side-byside clips while hearing a sentence including the novel verb without syntactic frames (7).

8 / TESSEI KOBAYASHI AND TAKAAKI SUZUKI(7) Nemat - / waget-teiru no dotchi
VERB-PROG
NML which‘Which is X-ing?’
We predicted that if the children were able to infer the meaning of the novel
verb that they heard during the dialogue phase, the children in the Transitive
condition would look longer at the causative scene than at the non-causative
scene in the test phase. In contrast, the children in the Intransitive condition
would look longer at the non-causative scene than at the causative scene.
Each trial in the baseline and the test trial lasted 12 seconds. At the endof each trial, the scene became blank for 1.5 seconds before the next trial
began. The left-right position of each video clip was randomized in a predetermined order.
4.4. Data Analysis
A coder who was not informed of the experimental design and condition
performed an offline frame-by-frame coding (30 frames/second) to calculate
how long the children looked at each scene (left and right) during the baseline and the test trials from a video recording. To assess data reliability, adifferent coder did offline coding of a random selection of about 20% of the
primary sample. The inter-coder correlations were high (mean = .97). We
calculated the proportion of time spent looking at the causative scene ineach trial.

5. Results
The time spent looking at the causative scene in the test phase was analyzed
with a mixed-design ANOVA with condition (Transitive vs. Intransitive)
and word type (nemaru vs. wageru) as between-subjects factors, and test
phase (baseline vs. test) and trial block (first vs. second) as within-subjects
factors. The analysis revealed a significant main effect of test phase, F (1,28) = 14.978, p = .001, ηp2 = .349, and a significant interaction between test
phase and condition, F (1, 28) = 24.788, p < .001, ηp2 = .469. No other main
effects or interactions were significant.
Further analysis with Bonferroni correction indicated that the children
in the Transitive condition looked significantly longer at the causative scene
in the test trials (M = 66.1%, SD 11.2) than in the baseline (M = 56.4%, SD10.6), F (1, 28) = 9.864, p = .004, ηp2 = .261. In contrast, those in the Intransitive condition looked significantly shorter at the causative scene in the test
trials (M = 45.5%, SD 14.8) than in the baseline trials (M = 57.5%, SD 13.7),
F (1, 28) = 15.201, p = .001, ηp2 = .352, indicating that they looked preferentially at the non-causative scene in the test trials than in the baseline trials.
These results are shown in Figure 3.

Mean Proportion of Looking
Time to the Causative SceneSYNTACTIC BOOTSTRAPPING IN JAPANESE CHILDREN / 970

Baseline
Test

65
60
55
50
45
40
35
30
Transitive

Intransitive
Condition	
 Figure 3. Mean Proportion of Looking Time to Causative Scene in
Baseline Phase and Test Phase in Transitive Condition
and Intransitive Condition (Error bars show standard errors.)

6. Discussion
Using an IPL paradigm that adopts a dialogue phase similar to that reported
by Yuan and Fisher (2009), the present study demonstrates that the Japanese-speaking 27-month-old children hearing transitive frames during the
dialogue phase looked preferentially at a causative scene over a noncausative scene, while those hearing the intransitive frames looked preferentially at a non-causative scene over a causative scene. These results reveal
syntactic bootstrapping in Japanese. While previous studies using act-out
tasks had reported children’s sensitivity to syntactic frames in argumentdrop languages such as Turkish and Mandarin (Göksun et al. 2008; Lee andNaigles 2008), the present study, using the IPL paradigm, provides additional support for Matsuo et al. (2012), which suggested that syntactic bootstrapping works in children learning Japanese as a first language.
Moreover, by using the dialogue method, we have demonstrated thatJapanese-speaking children can infer verb meanings from syntactic information alone in the absence of visual cues. This finding, which parallels
English studies (Arunachalam and Waxman 2010; Yuan and Fisher 2009),
supports Gleitman’s original idea that syntactic information is independently informative in early verb learning (Gleitman 1990), and extends this proposal to argument-drop languages. Our results indicate that Japanesespeaking children can associate causative meaning with the transitive frameand non-causative meaning with the intransitive frame in Japanese, which is10 / TESSEI KOBAYASHI AND TAKAAKI SUZUKI

certainly consistent with the results of Naigle’s original experimental study
in English.
Interestingly, however, these observations are not necessarily consistent
with the results of a number of previous studies. English-speaking children
often failed to show their preference for a non-causative scene for intransitive frames with the traditional procedure (Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff andNaigles 1996; Naigles and Kako 1993) as well as with the dialogue method(Arunachalam and Waxman 2010; Yuan and Fisher 2009). Note that this isalso true for the Japanese study reported by Matsuo et al. (2012). Some researchers claim that children do not associate an intransitive frame with a
non-causative scene because intransitive verbs do not necessarily denotenon-causative events. For example, play and fight, as in John and Billplayed/fought together, can be a reciprocal action involving a causative
meaning by the two participants (e.g., Arunachalam and Waxman 2010;
Noble, Rowland and Pine 2011). However, this line of reasoning cannot
explain why only some studies observed children’s preference for a noncausative scene with an intransitive frame (Kidd, Bavin and Rhodes 2001;
Naigles 1990). We must wait for future studies to resolve this issue, but it isimportant to note that this fact in itself does not undermine the possibility ofsyntactic bootstrapping, because all the previous studies mentioned above
observed that children figured out the distinction between transitive andintransitive frames for causative/non-causative events.

7. Concluding Remarks
In summary, we suggest that Japanese 27-month-olds can make inferences
about the meanings of novel verbs from syntactic information alone in theabsence of visual cues about referents. This is the first evidence to show thatsyntactic bootstrapping works in young children learning an argument-drop
language under highly controlled experimental conditions.
A further question arises as to what exactly the syntactic cues are forJapanese-speaking children. As with English, the number and the positionof argument NPs may be crucial, but Matsuo et al.’s study provides evidence against this possibility. Their experimental sentences included a sentence pattern involving two NPs without case markers, and they found that
this type of the sentences was not associated with either a causative or noncausative event. This leaves us with the idea that the existence of casemarkers is essential. To ascertain whether case markers alone can be robust
cues, we need to look at single-argument sentences, namely, sentences involving only one argument with a case marker and a verb (e.g., NP NOM V/ NP ACC V) (e.g., Suzuki 2007). This remains a topic for further research.
Alternatively, it may be true that both the number of argument NPs and case

SYNTACTIC BOOTSTRAPPING IN JAPANESE CHILDREN / 11

markers provide the essential information required for syntactic bootstrapping in Japanese.

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