Lexical Disambiguation in Verb Learning: Evidence from the Conjoined-Subject Intransitive Frame in English and Mandarin Chinese.

Sudha Arunachalam,Yongxiang Chen,Kristen Syrett

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00138

Abstract

When presented with a novel verb in a transitive frame (X is Ving Y), young children typically select a causative event referent, rather than one in which agents engage in parallel, non-causative synchronous events. However, when presented with a conjoined-subject intransitive frame (X and Y are Ving), participants (even adults, as we show) are at chance. Although in some instances, children older than three can obtain above-chance-level performance, these experiments still appear to rely upon a within-experiment contrast with the transitive frame. This leads us to ask whether children can achieve success with the intransitive frame without such a contrast among constructions, and map a novel verb appearing in such a frame onto a non-causative meaning. Building on recent evidence that adverbial modifiers can support word learning for adjectives and for verbs (when both nominal and verbal candidate interpretations are considered) by directing children to a particular construal of a scene, we test the hypothesis that a semantically informative modifier, together, will provide children with additional lexical information that allows them to narrow down verb meaning and identify a non-causative interpretation for a novel verb appearing in the conjoined-subject intransitive frame. We find that for English-speaking children and adults it does, but only when together directly modifies the verb phrase, suggesting that participants appeal to compositionality and not just the brute addition of another word, even one that is semantically meaningful, to arrive at the intended interpretation. Children acquiring Mandarin Chinese, in contrast, do not succeed with the translation-equivalent of together (although adult speakers do), but they do with dōu (roughly, the distributive quantifier “each”). Our results point to a valuable source of information young children learning verbs: modifiers with familiar semantics.

Highlights

Language learners the world over face the task of mapping unfamiliar words to meaning
Recent work finds that just like their English-acquiring counterparts, Mandarin-acquiring 2- and 3-year-olds take the transitive frame as a cue to causativity for both familiar verbs (Lee and Naigles, 2008) and novel verbs (Jiang and Haryu, 2014), and they are at chance in choosing between causative and synchronous scenes as referents for novel verbs in the conjoined-subject intransitive (Jiang and Haryu, 2014). At least with these two frames, Mandarin learners perform just as English learners do. This pattern raises two questions: why is the conjoinedsubject intransitive frame challenging for young learners— robustly so across typologically different languages—and is there other linguistic information that might help to direct their attention to the intended interpretation? With respect to the first question, we suggest that the conjoined-subject intransitive frame is underinformative, providing insufficient semantic information for children to achieve the intended mapping given the experimental context
Given that the same result obtained in both English and Mandarin, for adults who have acquired the syntax-semantics mappings in their respective languages, we conclude that the conjoined-subject intransitive frame is underinformative, and that children’s chance-level performance does not necessarily indicate lack of syntactic knowledge

Summary

Introduction

Language learners the world over face the task of mapping unfamiliar words to meaning. Given children’s ontological expectation that new words might label objects (rather than events or properties) (e.g., Golinkoff et al, 1996; Waxman and Booth, 2001), the difficulty of identifying verb meanings by observing the world. To overcome the challenges of acquiring verbs, children benefit from the principled relationship between the syntactic environments in which a verb appears and its semantic representation. The syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis posits that observations of the syntactic environment in which a verb appears paired with knowledge of the syntax-semantics mapping can guide the child’s verb learning process, and syntactic bootstrapping abilities are well-established in young children (e.g., Landau and Gleitman, 1985; Naigles, 1990; Fisher et al, 1994; Fisher, 2002)

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