{"pk":21335,"title":"Twice Upon a Time: Children Use Syntactic Bootstrapping to Learn the Meanings of Yesterday and Tomorrow","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Time words like ‘yesterday' and ‘tomorrow' are abstract, and are interpreted relative to the context in which they are produced: the word ‘tomorrow' refers to a different point in time now than in 24 hours. We tested 112 3- to 5-year-old Hindi-speaking children on their knowledge of ‘yesterday' and ‘tomorrow', which are represented by the same word in Hindi-Urdu: ‘kal'. We found that Hindi learners performed better than English learners when tested on actual past and future events, but that performance for hypothetical events was poor for both groups. Compatible with a “syntactic bootstrapping” account, we conclude that syntactic tense information – which is necessary for differentiating ‘yesterday' from ‘tomorrow' in Hindi – may play a stronger role in learning these words than mapping of specific words to particular past and future events (“event mapping”).","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Psychology; Cognition of Time; Language development; Syntax; Cross-linguistic analysis"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/65w252n2","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Urvi","middle_name":"","last_name":"Maheshwari","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California San Diego","department":""},{"first_name":"David","middle_name":"","last_name":"Barner","name_suffix":"","institution":"UC San Diego","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2024-01-01T19:00:00+01:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21335/galley/10934/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21335/galley/21780/download/"}]}