Two-year-olds use distributional cues to interpret transitivity-alternating verbs

Abstract

Two-year-olds assign appropriate interpretations to verbs presented in two English transitivity alternations, the causal and unspecified-object alternations (Naigles, 1996). Here we explored how they might do so. Causal and unspecified-object verbs are syntactically similar. They can be either transitive or intransitive, but differ in the semantic roles they assign to the subjects of intransitive sentences (undergoer and agent, respectively). To distinguish verbs presented in these two alternations, children must detect this difference in role assignments. We examined distributional features of the input as one possible source of information about this role difference. Experiment 1 showed that in a corpus of child-directed speech, causal and unspecified-object verbs differed in their patterns of intransitive-subject animacy and lexical overlap between nouns in subject and object positions. Experiment 2 tested children’s ability to use these two distributional cues to infer the meaning of a novel causal or unspecified-object verb, by separating the presentation of a novel verb’s distributional properties from its potential event referents. Children acquired useful combinatorial information about the novel verb simply by listening to its use in sentences, and later retrieved this information to map the verb to an appropriate event.

Linking Language and Events: Spatiotemporal Cues Drive Children’s Expectations About the Meanings of Novel Transitive Verbs

“…Several novel-verb studies have shown that children prefer different kinds of event prototypes following different syntactic alternations (see e.g. Fernandes, Marcus, Di Nubila, & Vouloumanos, 2006;Naigles, 1996Naigles, , 1998Scott & Fisher, 2009). The results of the present studies show both the availability of and the limits to this strategy for the broader verb-learning problem.…”

“…Second, children also interpret transitive verbs as referring to prototypical contact events (e.g., a girl patting another girl on the head) rather than events with parallel actions (Naigles & Kako, 1993). Third, under some circumstances, children prefer to interpret transitive verbs as referring prototypical causal events rather than prototypical contact events (Naigles 1996;Scott & Fisher, 2009). Finally, children prefer transitive verbs to refer to telic events (roughly, events that are 'finished' to a natural boundary point) rather than atelic ones, even in the absence of causality (Hohenstein, Naigles & Eisenberg 2004;Wagner 2010).…”

Finding meaning in a noisy world: exploring the effects of referential ambiguity and competition on 2·5-year-olds’ cross-situational word learning

“…More generally, the positive results of the no-and short-competition conditions add to a growing body of research suggesting that when children encounter a word under referential uncertainty, they are capable of establishing a lexical entry for that word and attaching to it facts about the contexts in which the word occurs (e.g., Arunachalam & Waxman, 2010;Messenger, Yuan, & Fisher, 2015;Scott & Fisher, 2009Smith & Yu, 2008;Suanda et al, 2014;Yuan & Fisher, 2009). This can include information about the accompanying referential scene, as demonstrated in the present experiment, as well as linguistic facts about the sentences in which the word is used (e.g., Arunachalam & Waxman, 2010;Messenger et al, 2015;Scott & Fisher, 2009;Yuan & Fisher, 2009).…”

“…This can include information about the accompanying referential scene, as demonstrated in the present experiment, as well as linguistic facts about the sentences in which the word is used (e.g., Arunachalam & Waxman, 2010;Messenger et al, 2015;Scott & Fisher, 2009;Yuan & Fisher, 2009). Children can subsequently retrieve these facts and use them to guide their interpretation of that word when they encounter it again in the future.…”

Desarrollo del uso y la fluidez de verbos, su importancia para la neuropsicología

“…el verbo, como uno de los procedimientos principales de adquisición. 3 Sin embargo, se ha observado que los niños de cuatro años de edad aún tienden a generar de forma espontánea innovaciones léxicas (cortillo para un instrumento que corta). Aun antes de utilizar este recurso, un número significativamente alto de niños tienden a emplear palabras ya existentes para indicar una acción o función.…”