Children use syntax to guide verb learning. We asked whether the syntactic structure in which a novel verb occurs is meaningful to children even without a concurrent scene from which to infer the verb’s semantic content. In two experiments, 2-year-olds observed dialogues in which interlocutors used a new verb in transitive (“Jane blicked the baby!”) or intransitive sentences (“Jane blicked!”). Children later heard the verb in isolation (“Find blicking!”) while watching a one-participant and a two-participant event presented side-by-side. Children who had heard transitive dialogues looked reliably longer at the two-participant event than did those who had heard intransitive dialogues. This effect persisted even when children were tested on a different day, but disappeared when no novel verb accompanied the test events (Experiment 2). Thus, 2-year-olds gather useful combinatorial information about a novel verb based simply on hearing it in sentences, and later retrieve that information to guide verb interpretation.
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