Understanding how input matters: verb learning and the footprint of universal grammar

Lidz, Jeffrey; Gleitman, Henry; Gleitman, Lila R.

doi:10.1016/s0010-0277(02)00230-5

Cited by 217 publications

(194 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…It seems likely that different semantic relationships may emerge at different stages of development. For example, the relationships between syntactic transitivity and causal events, and between ditransitivity and events of transfer, appear to hold cross-linguistically (Fisher et al, 1991;Gleitman, 1990) and even in the invented gesture systems of linguistically deprived deaf children (Feldman, Goldin-Meadow, & Gleitman, 1978;Goldin-Meadow & Mylander, 1998), suggesting that learners may be predisposed toward some of these fundamental constraints (although it is not clear whether this is the result of innate linguistic knowledge, Lidz, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 2003, or of more general pragmatic principles, Goldberg, 2004). Thus we would expect these factors to play a role in (mutually) constraining verb-syntax from an early stage in learning.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acquiring and processing verb argument structure: Distributional learning in a miniature language

Wonnacott

Newport

Tanenhaus

2008

Cognitive Psychology

226

218

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Adult knowledge of a language involves correctly balancing lexically-based and more languagegeneral patterns. For example, verb-argument structures may sometimes readily generalize to new verbs, yet with particular verbs may resist generalization. From the perspective of acquisition, this creates significant learnability problems (Baker 1979), with some researchers claiming a crucial role for verb semantics in the determination of when generalization may and may not occur (Pinker, 1989). Similarly, there has been debate regarding how verb-specific and more generalized constraints interact in sentence processing (Trueswell et al 1993;Mitchell 1987) and on the role of semantics in this process (Hare et al 2003). The current work explores these issues using artificial language learning. In three experiments using languages without semantic cues to verb distribution, we demonstrate that learners can acquire both verb-specific and verb-general patterns, based on distributional information in the linguistic input regarding each of the verbs as well as across the language as a whole. As with natural languages, these factors are shown to affect production, judgments and real-time processing. We demonstrate that learners apply a rational procedure in determining their usage of these different input-statistics and conclude by suggesting that a Bayesian perspective on statistical learning may be an appropriate framework for capturing our findings.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acquiring and processing verb argument structure: Distributional learning in a miniature language

Wonnacott

Newport

Tanenhaus

2008

Cognitive Psychology

226

218

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“…There is by now considerable evidence that such syntactic signatures provide a source of information that systematically cross-classifies the set of verbs within and across languages along lines of broad semantic similarity (Fisher, Gleitman & Gleitman, 1991;and for crosslinguistic evidence, Geyer, 1994;Lederer, Gleitman & Gleitman, 1995;Li, 1994). Furthermore, children are richly sensitive to these regularities in syntax-to-semantics mappings (Brown, 1957;Fisher, Hall, Rakowitz & Gleitman, 1994;Gropen, Pinker, Hollander, Goldberg & Wilson, 1989;Landau & Gleitman, 1985;Lidz, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 2003;Mintz & Gleitman, 2002;Naigles, 1990;Naigles, Gleitman & Gleitman, 1992;Naigles & Kako, 1993;Pinker, 1991;Snedeker, Thorpe & Trueswell, 2001;Waxman, 1994).…”

Section: A Proposal For How Mental Verbs Are Acquiredmentioning

confidence: 99%

When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs

2007

Self Cite

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Mental-content verbs such as think, believe, imagine and hope seem to pose special problems for the young language learner. One possible explanation for these difficulties is that the concepts that these verbs express are hard to grasp and therefore their acquisition must await relevant conceptual development. According to a different, perhaps complementary, proposal, a major contributor to the difficulty of these items lies with the informational requirements for identifying them from the contexts in which they appear. The experiments reported here explore the implications of these proposals by investigating the contribution of observational and linguistic cues to the acquisition of mental predicate vocabulary. We first demonstrate that particular observed situations can be helpful in prompting reference to mental contents, specifically, contexts that include a salient and/or unusual mental state such as a false belief. We then compare the potency of such observational support to the reliability of alternate or concomitant syntactic information (e.g., sentential complementation) in tasks where both children and adults are asked to hypothesize the meaning of novel verbs. The findings support the efficacy of false belief situations for increasing the saliency of mental state descriptions, but also show that syntactic information is a more reliable indicator of mentalistic interpretations than even the most cooperative contextual cues. Moreover, when syntactic and observational information sources converge, both children and simulated adult learners are vastly more likely to build conjectures involving mental verbs. This is consistent with a multiple-cue constraint satisfaction view of vocabulary acquisition. Taken together, our findings support the position that the informational demands of mapping, rather than age-related cognitive deficiency, can bear much of the explanatory burden for the learning problems posed by abstract words. Keywordstheory of mind; mental verbs; verb learning; syntactic bootstrapping; language acquisition --many of our complex ideas never had impressions that corresponded to them, and ...many of our complex impressions never are exactly copied in ideas.

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“…This single mapping would cover not only causal transitives but also those encoding contact, perception, motion, and spatial relationships. In fact, Fisher and colleagues have suggested that infants might begin verb learning with precisely this kind of broad mapping and only later develop LINKING LANGUAGE AND EVENTS 10 more specific intuitions (Fisher, Gertner, Scott, & Yuan, 2010;Fisher, 1996;Lidz, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 2003;Yuan, Fisher, & Snedeker, 2012). Second, children could believe (in addition to or instead of a general two-participant preference) that the transitive frame has multiple meaning 'clusters', each of which encodes a different specific event structure.…”

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confidence: 99%

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

Kline

Snedeker

Schulz

2016

Language Learning and Development

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How do children map linguistic representations onto the conceptual structures that they encode? In the present studies, we provided 3-4 year old children with minimal-pair scene contrasts in order to determine the effect of particular event properties on novel verblearning. Specifically, we tested whether spatiotemporal cues to causation also inform children's interpretation of transitive verbs either with or without the causal/inchoative alternation (She broke the lamp/the lamp broke). In Experiment 1, we examined spatiotemporal continuity. Children saw scenes with puppets that approached a toy in a distinctive manner, and toys that lit up or played a sound. In the causal events, the puppet contacted the object, and activation was immediate. In the noncausal events, the puppet stopped short before reaching the object, and the effect occurred after a short pause (apparently spontaneously). Children expected novel verbs used in the inchoative transitive/intransitive alternation to refer to spatiotemporally intact causal interactions rather than to 'gap' control scenes. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the temporal order of sub-events, holding spatial relationships constant, and provided evidence for only one verb frame (either transitive or intransitive). Children mapped transitive verbs to scenes where the agent's action closely preceded the activation of the toy over scenes in which the timing of the two events was switched, but did not do so when they heard an intransitive construction. These studies reveal that children's expectations about transitive verbs are at least partly driven by their nonlinguistic understanding of causal events: children expect transitive syntax to refer to scenes where the agent's action is a plausible cause of the outcome. These findings open a wide avenue for exploration into the relationship between children's linguistic knowledge and their nonlinguistic understanding of events. During their first years of life, children develop rich and robust cognitive models of the world around them. They represent the differences between people and objects, make predictions about physical and social events, and learn complex patterns of causal information ( Baker, Saxe, & Tenenbaum, 2011;Luo, Kaufman, & Baillargeon, 2009;Sobel, Tenenbaum, & Gopnik, 2004;Spelke, 1990;Woodward, 1998). At the same time, they learn the structure and content of at least one language, acquiring representations that allow them to understand the speech around them and produce novel sentences of their own. LINKING LANGUAGE AND EVENTSRelatively little is known about how children map these linguistic representations onto the conceptual structures that they encode.A central property of human language is that there are systematic correspondences between the form of sentence (syntax) and its meaning (semantics) (Baker, 1988;Brown, 1958;Fillmore, 1968;Montague, 1970;Pinker, 1984). For instance, although there are no familiar content words in the sentence The blicket daxed the wug to the blorg, adults can infer that t...

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Understanding how input matters: verb learning and the footprint of universal grammar

Cited by 217 publications

References 22 publications

Acquiring and processing verb argument structure: Distributional learning in a miniature language

Acquiring and processing verb argument structure: Distributional learning in a miniature language

When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs

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

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