Miranda Zhu publishes paper in Open Mind

Graduate student Xiaomeng Miranda Zhu, together with faculty members Tom McCoy and Bob Frank, has published a paper entitled “The Structural Sources of Verb Meanings Revisited: Large Language Models Display Syntactic Bootstrapping” in the journal Open Mind.  This paper uses Large Language Models to conduct the “forbidden experiment” where a language learner’s environment is systematically manipulated throughout the course of learning. By modulating the availability of syntactic and semantic cues, Zhu and colleagues provide support for the role of syntactic bootstrapping in the learning of verbs.