Abstract A previous study has shown that children use recent input to adapt their syntactic predictions and use these adapted predictions to infer the meaning of novel words. In the current study, we investigated whether children could use this mechanism to disambiguate words whose interpretation as a noun or a verb is ambiguous. We tested 2‐ to 4‐year‐old French children using the phrase la petite followed by a homophone that could be interpreted as either a noun or a verb. We assigned the children to a noun cond…