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Children between the ages of three and seven occasionally make errors with locative verbs like pour and fill, such as * I filled water into the glass and * I poured the glass with water (Bowerman, 1982). To account for this pattern of errors, and for how they are eventually unlearned, we propose that children use a universal linking rule called OBJECT AFFECTEDNESS: the direct object corresponds to the argument that is specified as ‘affected’ in some particular way in the semantic representation of a verb. However, children must learn which verbs specify which of their arguments as being affected; specifically, whether it is the argument whose referent is undergoing a change of location, such as the content argument of pour, or the argument whose referent is undergoing a change of state, such as the container argument of fill. This predicts that syntactic errors should be associated with specific kinds of misinterpretations of verb meaning. Two experiments were performed on the ability of children and adults to understand and produce locative verbs. The results confirm that children tend to make syntactic errors with sentences containing fill and empty, encoding the content argument as direct object (e.g. fill the water). As predicted, children also misinterpreted the meanings of fill and empty as requiring not only that the container be brought into a full or empty state, but also that the content move in some specific manner (by pouring, or by dumping). Furthermore, children who misinterpreted the verbs' meanings were more likely to make syntactic errors with them. These findings support the hypothesis that verb meaning and syntax are linked in precise ways in the lexicons of language learners.

AhstractCommon linguistic phenomena such äs selectional restrictions (e.g., the verb assassinate applies only to prominent people) and verb polysemy (e.g. f one meaning of roll applies only to round objects, äs in John rolled the ball another only to flat flexible objects, äs in John rolled iip the flagj suggest t Hai verb learning is context sensitive f where context may be characterized in terms ofthe conceptual categories (e.g., basic-level kinds) or grammatically relevant properties (e.g., shape/dimensionality) that apply to the arguments of a verb. Two experiments lest the prediction that verb learners are predisposed to associate conceptual and/or grammatically relevant Information with the arguments of a verb. Children andadults were taught two different verb meanings, for the same made-up verb stem, in the context of two different objects; they were then testedon their ability to act out the meaning of the verb. It was found that subjects were able to learn that different verb meanings applied to different objects when those objects differed only in dimensionality or only in basic-level categories, but not when those objects differed only in the linguistically less-relevant dimension of size, or only in subordinate-or superordinate-level categories. The results are taken to support the hypothesis that verb learning is context sensitive, and are interpreted with respect to two possible functions of context sensitivity: how children acquire selectional restrictions on the use of a verb, and how they individuate the different versions of a polysemous verb.... by analyzing carefully the conditions under which people are able (or unable) to resolve polysemy, it may be possible to learn more about the kinds of contextual Information that are involved and how those contexts interact with stored lexical Information. Polysemy offers a window on the association of form and meaning.George Miller, The science ofwords