Dear All,

 

This is a kind reminder about the tomorrow (Tuesday) extraordinary talk by Kristen Syrett (Rutgers University – New Brunswick), starting at 2 pm in room D002.

Kind regards,

Reka

 

 

The CEU Department of Cognitive Science cordially invites you to the following talk by:

 

Kristen Syrett, Rutgers University – New Brunswick

Date: TUESDAY February 17, 2026

Time: 2 pm (to 3:30 pm) CET (MIND the unusual starting time please!)

Venue: D002 (QS Vienna) and Zoom https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/92587555406?pwd=3wouq7fOCkfPPbQ2AnMrYla4qChxaN.1

 

Meeting ID: 925 8755 5406
Passcode: 894093

 

Chair: Ernő Téglás

 

Title:

How the linguistic context scaffolds the acquisition of emotion and mental state adjectives

 

Abstract:

A perennial question guiding our investigations as linguists and cognitive scientists is how young

children acquire the meaning of words, given the vast range of possible interpretations in any given

discourse context and the limited and error-ridden input to which children are exposed. The challenge

is amplified for those words whose meanings have no stable physical correlate. One popular and

successful proposal is that children can look to the syntactic structure of the utterance in which a

word appears to inform our understanding of that word’s semantic representation. This ‘syntactic

bootstrapping’ process hinges upon a tight relation between syntax and semantics, and children’s

knowledge of it, for children to engage in a sentence-to-world mapping in order to narrow the

hypothesis space of meanings. In recent years, researchers have extended this process to mental

state (or propositional attitude) verbs, which take clausal complements to signal a subject/agent’s

beliefs, desires, and preferences about the world. Interestingly, verbs are not the only words that take

syntactic arguments: some adjectives do as well. Moreover, some of these adjectives—those that

denote emotions or mental states—place additional semantic restrictions on their subject, requiring

it to be an animate experiencer that has the capacity to be, e.g., sad, happy, curious, anxious,

surprised, or confident. In this talk, I present collaborative work with Misha Becker documenting that

not only are these distributional cues about subject animacy and syntactic complementation present

in the speech to which children are exposed at significant frequencies, young children systematically

recruit these cues and display knowledge of these selectional constraints in an experimental setting.

This work thus demonstrates a wider applicability for syntactic bootstrapping across grammatical

categories, and illustrating how the linguistic context supports the acquisition of word meaning even

for those meanings that are internal and abstract. 

 

*Anyone not affiliated with CEU wishing to attend in-person in Vienna must reply here to get access to the lecture hall.

Let Ernő know, please, if you would like to schedule a meeting with the speaker.

 

Best,

Reka

 

 

 

Györgyné Finta (Réka) Department Coordinator Department of Cognitive Science  Pronouns: she/her | szabor@ceu.edu | +43 1 25230 5138 CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY Quellenstrasse 51 | A-1100 Vienna | Austria | www.ceu.edu