Verb argument structure overgeneralisations for the English intransitive and transitive constructions: grammaticality judgments and production priming

Abstract

We used a multi-method approach to investigate how children avoid (or retreat from) argument structure overgeneralisation errors (e.g., *You giggled me). Experiment 1 investigated how semantic and statistical constraints (preemption and entrenchment) influence children’s and adults’ judgments of the grammatical acceptability of 120 verbs in transitive and intransitive sentences. Experiment 2 used syntactic priming to elicit overgeneralisation errors from children (aged 5–6) to investigate whether the same constraints operate in production. For judgments, the data showed effects of preemption, entrenchment, and semantics for all ages. For production, only an effect of preemption was observed, and only for transitivisation errors with intransitive-only verbs (e.g., *The man laughed the girl). We conclude that preemption, entrenchment, and semantic effects are real, but are obscured by particular features of the present production task.

Testing a computational model of causative overgeneralizations: Child judgment and production data from English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and K’iche’

“…One possibility is that the “retreat from overgeneralization” is largely accomplished by age 4–5; the youngest age-group in the present study. However, this does not seem likely, given that the relevant errors are attested amongst children aged 4 years and above in (a) the present study, (b) previous experimental studies ( Bidgood et al , 2021 ; Fukuda & Fukuda, 2001 ), and (c) diary data ( Ambridge & Ambridge, 2020 ; Bowerman, 1988 ; Nakaishi, 2016 ).…”

Learners restrict their linguistic generalizations using preemption but not entrenchment: Evidence from artificial-language-learning studies with adults and children.

“…In contrast, *the clown laughed the man is not a possible utterance because the causing event (e.g., the clown telling a joke) and the caused event (i.e., the man laughing) are two events that are relatively distinct in time and space. For evidence of the importance of meaning in restricting these types of generalizations see—for the transitive causative—Pinker (1989), Brooks and Tomasello (1999), Ambridge et al (2008), Ambridge et al (2009), Ambridge et al (2011), Ambridge et al (2020), Ambridge et al (2022), Bidgood et al (2021) and—for other constructions—Ambridge et al (2012), Ambridge (2013), Ambridge et al (2014), Bidgood et al (2014), Blything et al (2014), Ambridge and Blything (2016). However, semantics alone is not a complete solution, since some restrictions seem to be semantically arbitrary (e.g., manage to do; succeed in doing vs. *succeed to do ; *manage in doing ).…”

Transitivity of Try and V Construction in British and American English

“…This even involves arguments of the predicate, or traditionally termed as objects (Noble, Rowland, & Pine, 2011, p. 964). The number of arguments taken by a predicate determines the type of the predicate, i.e., one-place predicate (intransitive), two-place predicate (transitive), or three-place predicate (ditransitive) (Bidgood et al, 2021;Shin, 2017, p. 12). A representation of the number and semantic roles of arguments of a predicate is called argument structure (Akbarnezhad, Sadighi, & Bagheri, 2020).…”