CATEGORIES IN THE MAKING: Assessing the role of semantics in the acquisition of noun and verb categories

Abstract

Little is known about what guides children in their acquisition of grammatical categories. This paper investigates how semantic knowledge could be involved in discovering these categories, thus confronting two competing hypotheses: are semantic categories innate, or are they developed in a piecemeal fashion? We tested for regular associations between basic semantic dimensions and the development of the founding categories of noun and verb. Six perceptually based semantic dimensions (Parisse and Poulain, 2010), shared by nouns and verbs but potentially distinctive, are coded in the productions of three children aged 1;06 to 2;06. Our results suggest that semantic dimensions do not offer an entry into the early differentiation of noun and verb categories.

Semantic discrimination of Noun/Verb categories in French children aged 1;6 to 2;11

“…Results computed for each semantic dimension separately did not provide clear differentiation between noun and verb categories (see Rossi & Parisse, 2012 for more details about one-dimensional analyses). As shown in Table 3, there were few semantic dimensions according to which a clear-cut difference could be found between nouns and verbs.…”

“…Little evidence could be found in Parisse and Rossi (2012) to confirm the principle of gradual development of semantic categories. Anaé showed a trend for verbs to become more often abstract as she got older.…”

“…Leaving aside the nativist vs. emergentist debate, however, the approaches are not necessarily as mutually exclusive as was previously thought. Our suggestions can also be seen as an attempt to rethink the semantic bootstrapping with a usage-based model (see Rossi and Parisse, 2012)…”

“…All children were recorded in spontaneous speech situations for one-hour sessions. All coding was done by one trained coder and checked by the authors until achieving full agreement on the coding (see also, Rossi & Parisse, 2012). Coding was performed using the context provided by the video, and according to the interpretation of the child's intentions by the adult as a conversational partner.…”

“…In Rossi and Parisse (2012), we addressed these two questions. We studied the development of the semantic characteristics of nouns and verbs in three French-speaking children from age 1;6 to 2;6, by coding for six semantic dimensions (corresponding to basic, real world properties) each time a noun or a verb was produced.…”