Learning attitude verb meanings in a morphosyntactically-poor language via syntactic bootstrapping

How do children learn that ”think” and ”want” mean different things? These verbs describe mental states that are difficult to observe from the physical environment. We suggest that the semantic differences can be learned from observing syntactic properties of these verbs. We then argue that this proposal is feasible even in a language like Mandarin Chinese, which has relatively simple verbal morphology and null arguments.