The role of incremental parsing in syntactically conditioned word learning

•16-month-old children use a noun's syntactic environment as a cue to its meaning.•Their use of these syntactic environments changes between 16 and 19 months.•This change is driven by changes in knowledge of subcategorization frame frequencies.•Children rely on knowledge of these frequencies to guide parsing.•When 19-month-olds receive a low-frequency frame, they make incorrect predictions.•These incorrect predictions combine with inability to revise to yield poor learning.

In a series of three experiments, we use children's noun learning as a probe into their syntactic knowledge as well as their ability to deploy this knowledge, investigating how the predictions children make about upcoming syntactic structure change as their knowledge changes. In the first two experiments, we show that children display a developmental change in their ability to use a noun's syntactic environment as a cue to its meaning. We argue that this pattern arises from children's reliance on their knowledge of verbs' subcategorization frame frequencies to guide parsing, coupled with an inability to revise incremental parsing decisions. We show that this analysis is consistent with the syntactic distributions in child-directed speech. In the third experiment, we show that the change arises from predictions based on verbs' subcategorization frame frequencies.