Structure and meaning in the verb lexicon: Input for a syntax-aided verb learning procedure

Abstract

How might children learn the meanings of new verbs? Well-known problems with unconstrained induction of word meanings from world observations suggest that additional sources of information are required. This paper presents an investigation of the availability of syntactic cues to verb meaning. If there exist strong and reliable parallels between verbs' structural and semantic properties, then each verb's linguistic context could provide valuable evidence about its meaning. In Experiments 1-3, adult subjects' judgements of verbs' semantic similarity were compared with other adults' judgements about the syntactic properties of the same verbs. In Experiment 4, subjects paraphrased sentences formed by pairing verbs with unaccustomed sentence frames (e.g. John thought the book to Mary). The findings from these investigations provide new and detailed support for the view that the syntax of verbs is a regular projection from their semantics, and therefore that there is considerable information about a verb's meaning to be gained by attending to its sentence contexts.

Grammatical Processing without Semantics? An Event-related Brain Potential Study of Preschoolers using Jabberwocky Sentences

“…It is more likely that children were using the limited lexical-semantic information present in the sentences to construct meaning. It has been shown that children can deduce the meanings of unknown verbs based on knowledge about other semantic and syntactic information in the sentence (Gleitman & Gillette, 1999;Naigles, 1990Naigles, , 1996Naigles & Hoff-Ginsberg, 1995;Fisher, 1994;Fisher, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 1991;Landau & Gleitman, 1985), as well as morphological markers on the verbs (e.g., Behrend, Harris, & Cartwright, 1995). Our children might have generated expectations about what words should occur after the pseudoverb based on their interpretations of the pseudoverbs.…”

Constructing Meaning: The Role of Affordances and Grammatical Constructions in Sentence Comprehension

“…First, it has been shown using a variety of tasks (e.g., Naigles, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 1992;Gropen, Pinker, Hollander, Goldberg, & Wilson, 1989) that children are sensitive to the meaning associated with particular syntactic forms. We aim to demonstrate here (along with Fisher, 1994;Naigles and Terrazas, 1998) that adults are also sensitive to this relationship. Second, we demonstrate that the meaning conveyed by particular syntactic forms is not due to previously learned lexical items (especially verbs) that may occur in these sentences.…”

The linguistic description of minimal social scenarios affects the extent of causal inference making

“…Evidence for this comes from studies in which novel verbs are used in diVerent constructions (e.g., Fisher, 1994;Kaschak & Glenberg, 2000). For example, Kaschak and Glenberg (2000) presented participants with sentences that had innovative denominal verbs (i.e., verbs that are created from nouns).…”