When it is better to receive than to give: Syntactic and conceptual constraints on vocabulary growth

Fisher, Cynthia; Hall, D. Geoffrey; Rakowitz, Susan; Gleitman, Lila R.

doi:10.1016/0024-3841(94)90346-8

Cited by 274 publications

(229 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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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%

“…For instance, thematic roles tend to line up one-to-one with argument positions in syntactic structures (roughly, the "theta criterion," Chomsky, 1981; see also Fisher, 1996;Fisher et al, 1994;Fisher & Gleitman, 2002; and, in most languages, occupy distinctive structural positions. These features are reproduced, as well, in the self-invented languages of the isolated deaf (Gleitman & Newport, 1996;Goldin-Meadow, 2003;Senghas, Coppola, Newport & Supalla, 1997).…”

Section: A Proposal For How Mental Verbs Are Acquiredmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The experimenter then explained that children's help was needed to understand what the characters were trying to say. We know from prior work that children are very willing to offer their assistance in this sort of setting, as they consider themselves the true intermediaries between fictional characters and the adult world (e.g., Fisher et al, 1994, Waxman & Gelman, 1986). …”

Section: Experiments 3: What Makes You Think You Are Hearing a Mental mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An important sub-hypothesis was that syntactic cues would largely overwhelm observational biases when these cues were in conflict (the FB scene/T frame and TB scene/S-comp frame conditions). This hypothesis was based on the almost categorical tendency for nonsense sentence-complement sentences to elicit cognitive verb conjectures in prior work (Snedeker & Gleitman, 2004) and in general the statistical though not categorical priority of linguistic cues for both children and adults (e.g., Fisher et al, 1994). A related prediction was that the patterning of child and adult responses would be approximately the same, consistent with the information change hypothesis rather than the developmental change hypothesis (as described in the Introduction to this paper).…”

Section: Experiments 3: What Makes You Think You Are Hearing a Mental mentioning

confidence: 99%

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When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs

2007

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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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Section: A Proposal For How Mental Verbs Are Acquiredmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Proposal For How Mental Verbs Are Acquiredmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Experiments 3: What Makes You Think You Are Hearing a Mental mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Experiments 3: What Makes You Think You Are Hearing a Mental mentioning

confidence: 99%

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When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs

2007

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“…After all, even within a language the very same motion event is variably describable and perhaps concentrates the mind's eye on different aspects of it. For instance, The mouse chased the elephant and The elephant fled (from) the mouse describe the same action scenario and yet the two sentences bring the mouse and the elephant into differential focus (Gleitman, 1990;Fisher, Hall, Rakowitz and Gleitman, 1994). What if, in this or a related regard, two languages disagreed systematically and regularly on how to frame events?…”

Section: An Experimental Prospectus: Issues and Predictionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shake, rattle, ‘n’ roll: the representation of motion in language and cognition

2002

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Languages vary strikingly in how they encode motion events. In some languages (e.g. English), manner of motion is typically encoded within the verb, while direction of motion information appears in modifiers. In other languages (e.g. Greek), the verb usually encodes the direction of motion, while the manner information is encoded in modifiers. We designed two studies to investigate whether these language-specific patterns affect speakers' reasoning about motion. We compared the performance of English and Greek children and adults (a) in non-linguistic (memory and categorization) tasks involving motion events, and (b) in their linguistic descriptions of these same motion events. Even though the two linguistic groups differed significantly in terms of their linguistic preferences, their performance in the non-linguistic tasks was identical. More surprisingly, the linguistic descriptions given by subjects within language also failed to correlate consistently with their memory and categorization performance in the relevant regards. For the domain studied, these results are consistent with the view that conceptual development and organization are largely independent of languagespecific labeling practices. The discussion emphasizes that the necessarily sketchy nature of speech assures that it will be at best a crude index of thought. AbstractLanguages vary strikingly in how they encode motion events. In some languages (e.g. English), manner of motion is typically encoded within the verb, while direction of motion information appears in modifiers. In other languages (e.g. Greek), the verb usually encodes the direction of motion, while the manner information is encoded in modifiers. We designed two studies to investigate whether these language-specific patterns affect speakers' reasoning about motion. We compared the performance of English and Greek children and adults (a) in non-linguistic (memory and categorization) tasks involving motion events, and (b) in their linguistic descriptions of these same motion events. Even though the two linguistic groups differed significantly in terms of their linguistic preferences, their performance in the non-linguistic tasks was identical.More surprisingly, the linguistic descriptions given by subjects within language also failed to correlate consistently with their memory and categorization performance in the relevant regards. For the domain studied, these results are consistent with the view that conceptual development and organization are largely independent of language-specific labeling practices. The discussion emphasizes that the necessarily sketchy nature of speech assures that it will be at best a crude index of thought.3

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Language Acquisition

Fisher¹,

Gleitman²

2002

Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology

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Learning to speak and understand a language is probably one of the most complicated tasks we ever do. Yet this learning task is regularly accomplished by very young children. Three fundamental components of this task structure our review: discovering the words (and other linguistic forms), entertaining concepts of the kind expressed by those linguistic forms, and mapping linguistic elements onto their meanings. First, children must analyze the stream of speech to find the particular linguistic forms used in their community. We review evidence that listeners, from infancy to adulthood, are exquisitely sensitive to the details and the statistics of their experience with spoken language. Second, children must be able to entertain concepts of the kind that are expressed in languages. Here we recruit evidence from the field of infant cognition to argue that pre‐linguistic infants form object categories and factor their knowledge of events into objects (e.g., cup, ball) and relations between them (e.g., containment). These structured concepts constitute the semantic building blocks of language. Striking evidence that usefully‐structured concepts precede language learning comes from the invented communication systems (Home Sign) of linguistically isolated deaf children. Third, children must accomplish a specific mapping between linguistic elements and the ideas they evoke. We propose that children learn a core vocabulary of concrete words (including many names for things) by observing which words systematically occur with particular elements in the world. This is no simple process—it depends on every aspect of the child's developing conceptual apparatus and nascent understanding of human intentions. This initial vocabulary, in turn, boosts the child into a better position to learn other words, and to begin to work out the phrase structure of the language. Even very young children use partial knowledge of syntax to guide sentence interpretation, and therefore to learn new words.

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When it is better to receive than to give: Syntactic and conceptual constraints on vocabulary growth

Cited by 274 publications

References 33 publications

When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs

When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs

Shake, rattle, ‘n’ roll: the representation of motion in language and cognition

Language Acquisition

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