The purpose of this SuperUROP is to expand on and improve the research on syntactical and semantic bootstrapping of how young children learn new verbs. The current framework of a problem is a sentence with a not real word as the verb (/He glipped the balloon/) and using Bayesian inference to determine which class of verbs glipped might be a part of. Giving a limited number of hypotheses the verb could belong to and through repeated use of the verb in a sentence, we are able to determine which hypothesis we believe is most likely. These inferences are then representative of how a young child (ages 3–10) will learn about new verbs. The goal is to raise the number of verbs we work with as well as be able to include a greater number of hypotheses to compare with the verb.

SuperUROP really interested me because I knew I wanted to do research while at MIT and this opportunity gives me the ability to spend an entire year on one project with the additional guidance of the 6.UAR lectures. I hope to learn more about what it is like to do research in Course 6 and I am excited the project also deals with learning and language development.