Studying how children learn words with no meaning

Project leaders at the MIT Language Acquisition Lab say their research could shed new light on the nature of language learning. Researchers at the  MIT Language Acquisition Lab  are using funds from the  2022 Levitan Prize in the Humanities  to carry out a set of studies investigating children's acquisition of "expletives" or "dummy words" - words that don't seem to have any meaning. Associate professor of linguistics Athulya Aravind, who received her PhD in linguistics at MIT in 2018, was awarded the prize last year and has been leading this initiative. Her research into first language acquisition involves looking at children's developing understanding of what structures are allowed in their language, how those structures are interpreted, and how they may be used in conversation. In English, expletives appear in sentences like "There is a book I would like to write" and "It is clear that the book will be fascinating." In these examples, "there" and "it" contribute no meaning, but instead provide a filler subject so that the sentences satisfy the rules of English grammar. "The standard assumption is that word learning is a process of mapping word-forms to meaning. Expletives are immediately interesting as they clearly don't conform to this assumption," Aravind says.