This study explored the use of sophisticated vocabulary, complex syntax, and decontextualized language (including book information, conceptual information, past/future experiences, and vocabulary information) in teachers’ instructional interactions with children during the literacy block in prekindergarten and kindergarten classrooms. The sample included 33 teachers and 421 children. We examined correlations among these language features and their unique contributions to children’s vocabulary learning. Teachers who used more sophisticated vocabulary also engaged in more decontextualized talk about vocabulary and past/future experiences. Additionally, teachers’ use of complex syntax was uniquely associated with talk about conceptual information. Both complex syntax and conceptual information talk predicted children’s vocabulary learning; however, complex syntax emerged as the sole predictor when accounting for this relationship. This finding suggests that decontextualized talk about concepts, characterized by complex language structures, may facilitate vocabulary acquisition.

Meaning comes in different shapes and sizes. Content words like parrot and persimmon and perambulate convey some important – and very specific – kinds of meanings. But the kinds of meaning that syntactic structures encode are of a different sort. They are more general and abstract than those kinds of words, and they are linked to the underlying organization of language. The essential insight behind syntactic bootstrapping is that children can leverage the way that structural elements connect to abstract meanings to help them acquire the more specific kinds of meanings in the content words.

In ‘Being pragmatic about syntactic bootstrapping’, Hacquard (2022) argues that abstract syntax is useful for word learning, but that an additional cue, pragmatics, is both necessary and available for young children during the first steps of language acquisition. She focuses on modals and attitude verbs, where the physical context seems particularly impoverished as the sole basis for deriving meanings, and thus where linguistic cues may be particularly helpful. She convincingly shows how pragmatic and syntactic cues could be combined to help young language learners learn and infer the possible meanings of attitude verbs such as “think”, “know” or “want”. She also argues that, in some circumstances, syntax and pragmatics would need to be supplemented by semantic information from context – for instance, in the case of modals such as “might”, “can”, or “must”. We agree with Hacquard on the importance of the synergies between these different cues to meaning, and wish to add two other aspects of the input that might also be used by young children in these contexts. The aspects we describe can only be noticed when one analyzes concrete examples of what children hear in their everyday lives, something which Hacquard does very often in her work (e.g., Dieuleveut, van Dooren, Cournane & Hacquard, 2022; Huang, White, Liao, Hacquard & Lidz, 2022; Yang, 2022). Taking into account different cues for meaning would help the field go beyond current models of syntactic bootstrapping, and create an integrated picture of the synergies between different levels of linguistic information.

Like verbs, adjectives pose a challenge to the young word learner in that some – like red, round, rough, or rectangular – map onto properties that are detectable through the senses, while others – like ready, reasonable, or required – express abstract properties that have no reliable, physical correlate. Even for those adjectives whose properties are observable, how does a child know that one particular property is being highlighted above all others? The physical environment alone will not suffice. Just as with verbs, the child learning adjectives is faced with an inherent indeterminacy of meaning, which can only be resolved through the incorporation of cues originating from multiple sources.

Words have meanings vastly undetermined by the contexts in which they occur. Their acquisition therefore presents formidable problems of induction. Lila Gleitman and colleagues have advocated for one part of a solution: indirect evidence for a word’s meaning may come from its syntactic distribution, via syntactic bootstrapping. But while formal theories argue for principled links between meaning and syntax, actual syntactic evidence about meaning is noisy and highly abstract. This paper examines the role that syntactic bootstrapping can play in learning modal and attitude verb meanings, for which the physical context is especially uninformative. I argue that abstract syntactic classifications are useful to the child, but that something further is both necessary and available. I examine how pragmatic and syntactic cues can combine in mutually constraining ways to help learners infer attitude meanings, but need to be supplemented by semantic information from the lexical context in the case of modals.

Experimental research has shown that English-learning children as young as 19 months, as well as children learning other languages (e.g., Mandarin), infer some aspects of verb meanings by mapping the nominal elements in the utterance onto participants in the event expressed by the verb. The present study assessed this structure or analogical mapping mechanism (SAMM) on naturalistic speech in the linguistic environment of 20 Spanish-learning infants from Argentina (average age 19 months). This study showed that the SAMM performs poorly – at chance level – especially when only noun phrases (NPs) included in experimental studies of the SAMM were parsed. If agreement morphology is considered, the performance is slightly above chance but still very poor. In addition, it was found that the SAMM performs better on intransitive and transitive verbs, compared to ditransitives. Agreement morphology has a beneficial effect only on transitive and ditransitive verbs. On the whole, concerns are raised about the role of the SAMM in infants’ interpretation of verb meaning in natural exchanges.

The aim of this study was to examine (a) the development of vocabulary and grammar in children with family-risk (FR) of dyslexia and their peers with no such risk (NoFR) between ages 1;6 and 6;0, and (b) whether FR-status exerted an effect on the direction of temporal relationships between these two constructs. Groups were assessed at seven time-points using standardised tests and parental reports. Results indicated that although FR and NoFR children had a similar development in the earlier years, the FR group appeared to perform significantly more poorly on vocabulary at the end of the preschool period. Results showed no significant effect of FR status on the cross-lagged relations between lexical and grammatical skills, suggesting a similar developmental pattern of cross-domain relations in both groups. However, FR status seemed to have a significantly negative association with vocabulary and grammar scores at age 6;0, resulting in language outcomes in favour of NoFR children.