The role of incremental parsing in syntactically conditioned word learning.

•16-month-old children use a noun’s syntactic environment as a cue to its meaning.•Their use of these syntactic environments changes between 16 and 19 months.•This change is driven by changes in knowledge of subcategorization frame frequencies.•Children rely on knowledge of these frequencies to guide parsing.•When 19-month-olds receive a low-frequency frame, they make incorrect predictions.•These incorrect predictions combine with inability to revise to yield poor learning.