Context-sensitive verb learning: Children's ability to associate contextual information with the argument of a verb

Abstract

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

Children's resistance to homonymy: an experimental study of pseudohomonyms

“…If such patterns exist and children do learn them, it may be possible to learn new meanings for words that have been defined by one of the learned patterns. At present, precious little research has been done on the acquisition of polysemes (see Gropen, Epstein & Schumacher, 1997, for one exception), and so any proposal about how polysemes are learned remains speculative until further research has been completed. Nonetheless, it is a topic that may shed a good deal of light upon the way in which we learn the meanings of words, and is therefore worthy of investigation.…”

The Developmental Origins of Syntactic Bootstrapping

“…To identify such argument‐structure alternations, learners must not only count the noun–phrase arguments, but also categorize them by their semantic roles—in this case, noting that intransitive break has a patient subject, and intransitive sweep has an actor subject (Ameka, ; Gropen, Epstein & Shumacher, ).…”