“Really, he dased the doll to the girl?” Two-year-olds can exploit grammatical and thematic content to learn novel verb meanings

Infants exploit the syntactic context verbs appear in to guide verb learning: a mechanism known as syntactic bootstrapping. However, it remains unclear whether infants' bootstrapping representations are achieved by matching the number of nouns in a sentence to the number of participants in an event, or by exploiting a more specific mapping between syntactic positions and thematic roles. To investigate this, we tested toddlers' ability to learn the meaning of a novel verb by relying on sentences'