Abstract
This study explores children’s encoding of novel verbs referring to motion events, and finds influence of both language-specific and universal constraints on meaning. Motion verbs fall into two categories—manner verbs encode how a movement happens (run, swim), and path verbs encode the starting and ending point of a motion (enter, fall). Some languages express path more frequently in the verb (Spanish, Hebrew), and others manner more frequently (English, German). Our study expands on this previous work demonstrating sensitivity to these language-specific distributions, as well as expanding to test environmental factors representing a predictable universal distribution. We find that children are sensitive to both the language-specific factors as well as the universal factors in motion verb acquisition.
Highlights
Learning verb meanings poses massive challenges to the learner—after all, any given scene displays almost infinite ambiguity, and even the event to which a verb refers contains many potential meaning referents
Language acquisitionists have long investigated these constraints—what are they? Which are universal? Which are language-specific? And how does the learner come to acquire the language-specific biases? The current study explores children’s encoding of novel verbs referring to motion events, manipulating both a language-specific cue, as well as what we hypothesize is a more universal constraint on verb meanings
We find that children show evidence of being influenced by both constraints in their mapping of novel motion verbs
Summary
Learning verb meanings poses massive challenges to the learner—after all, any given scene displays almost infinite ambiguity, and even the event to which a verb refers contains many potential meaning referents. We might imagine that in order to overcome such ambiguity children narrow down meanings by receiving exposures over a variety of contexts We know this kind of robust evidence is not always available to the child, indicating that she must have some additional constraints guiding this mapping. The current study explores children’s encoding of novel verbs referring to motion events, manipulating both a language-specific cue, as well as what we hypothesize is a more universal constraint on verb meanings. Native English speakers might find the “what is hopping?” question rather intuitive—the default in English is to map a motion verb to a manner. This intuition is not universal—not all languages default to encoding manner.
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