Acquisition Of Argument Structure Research Articles

Argument Types Affect Children's Acquisition of a Novel Argument Structure.

Acquisition of an argument structure may be affected by the diversity of lexical types that appear in that structure (Conwell etal., 2011; Yang, 2016). Seventy-two 5- and 6-year-old English-speaking children completed a learning study where they were exposed to a novel argument structure and then tested on their ability to comprehend it. The number of verb types heard in the learning phase did not predict comprehension at test. However, learning with only full noun phrase arguments resulted in lower comprehension of the structure, particularly with pronouns. Hearing pronouns during learning supported comprehension of all argument types at test. These results indicate that pronominal arguments support argument structure learning by providing multiple cues that can facilitate thematic role assignment.

Reconstructing the ditransitive construction for Proto-Germanic: Gothic, Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic

AbstractThe semantic range of ditransitive verbs in Modern English has been at the center of linguistic attention ever since the pioneering work of Pinker (1989.Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press). At the same time, historical research on how the semantics of the ditransitive construction has changed over time has seriously lagged behind. In order to address this issue for the Germanic languages, the Indo-European subbranch to which Modern English belongs, we systematically investigate the narrowly defined semantic verb classes occurring in the ditransitive construction in Gothic, Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic. On the basis of data handed down from Proto-Germanic and documented in the oldest layers of the three Germanic subbranches, East, West and North Germanic, respectively, we show that the constructional range of the ditransitive construction was considerably broader in the earlier historical stages than now; several subclasses of verbs that could instantiate the ditransitive in early Germanic are infelicitous in the ditransitive construction in, for instance, Modern English. Taking the oldest surviving evidence from Germanic as point of departure, we reconstruct the ditransitive construction for an earlier proto-stage, using the formalism of Construction Grammar and incorporating narrowly defined semantic verb classes and higher level conceptual domains. We thus reconstruct the internal structure of the ditransitive construction in Proto-Germanic, including different levels of schematicity.

The effects of the pronoun me on dative comprehension.

The English dative alternation has received much attention in the literature on argument structure acquisition in children. However, the data on the acquisition of this alternation have consistently revealed a counter-intuitive pattern: children look more proficient with the lower frequency prepositional form of the dative than with the higher frequency double object form (Conwell & Demuth, 2007; Rowland & Noble, 2010). This may be because the DO dative typically occurs with pronominal argument types in first post-verbal position, which may result in an over-reliance on stereotyped forms (e.g., give + me) for early comprehension and production (Conwell, O'Donnell, & Snedeker, 2011). This paper presents three studies of the effects of the pronoun me on dative comprehension by three-year-olds. Children's comprehension of the DO dative improved significantly when the first post-verbal argument was pronominal; no other effects of pronoun use were significant. Children's experience affects their ability to use lexically general representations of syntactic structures.

The logical problem of second language acquisition of argument structure: Recognizing aspectual distinctions in Spanish psych-predicates

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: This article explores the issue of second language (L2) acquisition of argument structure as it relates specifically to Spanish psych-verbs. These predicates are classified into three classes according to their distinct aspectual nature, which corresponds to different morphosyntactic properties. This study tests L2 learners’ ability to understand these subtle distinctions in spite of the impoverished input to which they are exposed and the lack of instruction and first language (L1) transfer. In particular, the research questions I explore are the following: (1) Are L2 learners aware of the fact that Class III has two possible word order configurations while Class II allows only one? (2) Do L2ers recognize that Class II allows antipassive se whereas Class III does not? Design/methodology/approach and data and analysis: A control group of 36 native Spanish speakers and an experimental group of 65 native English learners of Spanish across four proficiency levels conducted two scalar grammaticality judgment tasks. Their data, analyzed through repeated-measures ANOVA, showed that these L2ers had a good understanding of the morphosyntactic reflexes that distinguish eventive and stative psych-verbs. Findings/conclusions: Since these properties could neither have been learned through instruction nor transferred from the L1 or accessed straightforwardly from the input, learners must have resorted to universal mappings between meaning and syntax in order to achieve these target-like patterns of behavior. Originality: Although the acquisition of argument structure has been the topic of a considerable amount of early research in the field, this article looks at a completely novel instantiation of argument structure and its learnability. Significance/implications: This study contributes with new data to the long-standing debate on the poverty-of-the-stimulus (POS) argument by supporting positions that contend that L2 acquisition is characterized by a logical problem and that L2 learners can successfully overcome this POS by resorting to universal principles.

Language, cognition, and human nature: selected articles

Introduction 1. Formal models of language learning 2. A computational theory of the mental imagery medium 3. Rules and connections in human language 4. When does human object recognition use a viewer-centered reference frame? 5. Natural language and natural selection 6. The acquisition of argument structure 7. The nature of human concepts: evidence from an unusual source 8. Why nature and nurture won't go away 9. The faculty of language: What's special about it? 10. So how does the mind work? 11. Deep commonalities between life and mind 12. Rationales for indirect speech: The theory of the strategic speaker 13. The cognitive niche: Coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language Author Biography

A Study on the acquisition of the argument structures of locative verbs by Korean high school EFL learners

This paper investigates the aspect of the acquisition of argument structures of English locative verbs by Korean high school EFL learners (more specifically to find which argument between Theme and Location is unmarked for the object position of locative verbs) and the effect of L1 transfer on acquiring L2 argument structures. For the study, 165 Korean high school learners and 11 native English-speaking teachers participated in an elicited-production task, and 76 Korean high school learners and 11 native English-speaking teachers did in a grammatical judgement task. Based on the results, both Korean EFL learners and the native English-speaking teachers preferentially used the Theme-object structure. It can be interpreted that Theme is an unmarked argument for the object position and locative argument is a marked one. And when it comes to L1 transfer, Korean EFL learners have a tendency to transfer the argument structures of Korean locative verbs into those of English ones. Thus, these results showed that the L1 argument structure plays an important role in the acquisition of the L2 argument structure.

The roles of verb semantics, entrenchment, and morphophonology in the retreat from dative argument-structure overgeneralization errors

Children (aged five-to-six and nine-to-ten years) and adults rated the acceptability of well-formed sentences and argument-structure overgeneralization errors involving the prepositional-object and double-object dative constructions (e.g. Marge pulled the box to Homer /* Marge pulled Homer the box ). In support of the entrenchment hypothesis, a negative correlation was observed between verb frequency and the acceptability of errors, across all age groups. Adults additionally displayed sensitivity to narrow-range semantic constraints on the alternation, rejecting double-object dative uses of novel verbs consistent with prepositional-dative-only classes and vice versa. Adults also provided evidence for the psychological validity of a proposed morphophonological constraint prohibiting Latinate verbs from appearing in the double-object dative. These findings are interpreted in the light of a recent account of argument-structure acquisition, under which children retreat from error by incrementally learning the semantic, phonological, and pragmatic properties associated with particular verbs and particular construction slots.

The Acquisition of Argument Structure

Abstract Languages differ in how argument structures are marked usually using some combination of word order, case-marking and verb agreement. In addition, there are usage patterns such as animacy contrasts that are sometimes associated with patterns of argument structure and verb valencies. Drawing on recent research within the usage-based approach, we discuss the nature of children's early knowledge of argument structure and how children might learn the basic argument structures of their language. We review studies investigating the role of structure-general biases, competition between cues, verb meaning and interaction between constructions in the acquisition of argument structure.

Verb argument structure acquisition in young children: defining a role for discourse

Two-, three- and four-year-old English learners enacted sentences that were missing a direct object (e.g. *The zebra brings.). Previous work has indicated that preschoolers faced with such ungrammatical sentences consistently alter the usual meaning of the verb to fit the syntactic frame (enacting 'zebra comes'); older children are more likely to repair the syntax to fit the meaning of the verb (enacting 'zebra brings something'; Naigles, Gleitman & Gleitman, 1993). We investigated whether young children performed more repairs if an informative context preceded the ungrammatical sentences. Test sentences were preceded by short vignettes that created a relationship between three characters. Children repaired more sentences than had been found previously; however, older preschoolers also repaired significantly more frequently than younger preschoolers. Discourse context thus seems relevant to the acquisition of verb argument structure, but is not the sole source of information.

Time in child Inuktitut: A developmental study of an Eskimo-Aleut language (review)

Reviewed by: Time in child Inuktitut: A developmental study of an Eskimo-Aleut language by Mary D. Swift Edward J. Vajda Time in child Inuktitut: A developmental study of an Eskimo-Aleut language. By Mary D. Swift. (Studies on language acquisition 24.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004. Pp. xii, 315. ISBN 3110181207. $137 (Hb). Most studies of child language acquisition up till now have focused on Indo-European or the major languages of East Asia. An investigation of how children master the typologically very different structure of a language such as Inuktitut is therefore of considerable theoretical interest. This book describes how children up to the age of three and a half acquire the mechanisms of time reference in the Tarramiut (Hudson Strait) subdialect of Inuktitut, a language spoken by about fifteen hundred Inuit in arctic Quebec. Introductory chapters describe the tense-aspect-mood system of adult Inuktitut, and survey what is known crosslinguistically about how TAM morphology is acquired in early childhood. The data analyzed derive from corpora collected from eight children for two previous studies: Cultural context in communicative interaction of young Inuit children by Martha Crago (Montreal: McGill University dissertation, 1988) and Aspects of argument structure acquisition in Inuktitut by Shanley Allen (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996). Note that S investigates the acquisition of a different facet of language structure from these earlier studies. Her description of the verb morphology in adult Tarramiut is also important, given the lack of any comparable overview. Publications on related aspects of Inuktitut grammar or other Inuit dialects are surveyed briefly on pp. 8–11. The last six chapters document how young children learning Inuktitut as a native language master increasingly more complex tense-aspect structures. The first verb forms acquired are zero-marked for tense-aspect. Among these, telic verbs tend to be used to express past completed events, while atelic verbs express present ongoing events. S shows how children later add suffixes marking viewpoint aspect, as well as suffixes marking degrees of temporal remoteness in the past or future. The results are particularly illuminating when compared to existing studies of European languages since this represents the first study of child acquisition of morphemes marking temporal remoteness. S uncovers a number of patterns that pose a challenge to previous assumptions about universal tendencies in child language acquisition. All of these, however, find explanation in light of the system of time reference characteristic of adult Inuktitut. For example, because Inuktitut encodes a basic future/nonfuture distinction rather than the more familiar past/nonpast dichotomy characteristic of European languages, the Inuit children surveyed naturally developed future markers before past markers. They also used overt past tense markers with atelic verbs first rather than with telic verbs. These findings contrast with studies based on the acquisition of European languages, where past tense marking with telic verbs is primary, and future markers appear later than markers of past tense. S’s results clearly testify to the importance of examining as broad a typological range of languages as possible before drawing conclusions about universal tendencies in child language acquisition. The book ends with suggestions for future research, including the need to measure passive knowledge of time reference mechanisms in young Inuit children, as well as to examine acquisition in older children acquiring Inuktitut as a native language. Finally, one can only hope this study will stimulate investigations into how children acquire other complex morphologies. Edward J. Vajda Western Washington University/Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Copyright © 2007 Linguistic Society of America ...

The effect of verb semantic class and verb frequency (entrenchment) on children’s and adults’ graded judgements of argument-structure overgeneralization errors

Participants (aged 5–6 yrs, 9–10 yrs and adults) rated (using a five-point scale) grammatical (intransitive) and overgeneralized (transitive causative) 1 Throughout this paper, the term “intransitive” (whether referring to a verb or construction) refers only to non-causative intransitives – sometimes termed “inchoative intransitives” – (e.g., The man laughed) and not to intransitives with unspecified or unexpressed objects (e.g., The man ate). The term “transitive causative” (e.g., The sun melted the snow) is used to contrast sentences of this type with both transitive non-causatives (e.g., John saw Bill) and periphrastic causatives (e.g., The sun made the snow melt). 1 uses of a high frequency, low frequency and novel intransitive verb from each of three semantic classes [Pinker, S. (1989a). Learnability and cognition: the acquisition of argument structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press]: “directed motion” ( fall, tumble), “going out of existence” ( disappear, vanish) and “semivoluntary expression of emotion” ( laugh, giggle). In support of Pinker’s semantic verb class hypothesis, participants’ preference for grammatical over overgeneralized uses of novel (and English) verbs increased between 5–6 yrs and 9–10 yrs, and was greatest for the latter class, which is associated with the lowest degree of direct external causation (the prototypical meaning of the transitive causative construction). In support of Braine and Brooks’s [Braine, M.D.S., & Brooks, P.J. (1995). Verb argument strucure and the problem of avoiding an overgeneral grammar. In M. Tomasello & W. E. Merriman (Eds.), Beyond names for things: Young children’s acquisition of verbs (pp. 352–376). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum] entrenchment hypothesis, all participants showed the greatest preference for grammatical over ungrammatical uses of high frequency verbs, with this preference smaller for low frequency verbs, and smaller again for novel verbs. We conclude that both the formation of semantic verb classes and entrenchment play a role in children’s retreat from argument-structure overgeneralization errors.

Semantic generality, input frequency and the acquisition of syntax

In many areas of language acquisition, researchers have suggested that semantic generality plays an important role in determining the order of acquisition of particular lexical forms. However, generality is typically confounded with the effects of input frequency and it is therefore unclear to what extent semantic generality or input frequency determines the early acquisition of particular lexical items. The present study evaluates the relative influence of semantic status and properties of the input on the acquisition of verbs and their argument structures in the early speech of 9 English-speaking children from 2;0 to 3;0. The children's early verb utterances are examined with respect to (1) the order of acquisition of particular verbs in three different constructions, (2) the syntactic diversity of use of individual verbs, (3) the relative proportional use of semantically general verbs as a function of total verb use, and (4) their grammatical accuracy. The data suggest that although measures of semantic generality correlate with various measures of early verb use, once the effects of verb use in the input are removed, semantic generality is not a significant predictor of early verb use. The implications of these results for semantic-based theories of verb argument structure acquisition are discussed.

Going, going, gone: the acquisition of the verb 'go'.

This study investigated different accounts of early argument structure acquisition and verb paradigm building through the detailed examination of the acquisition of the verb Go. Data from 11 children followed longitudinally between the ages of 2;0 and 3;0 were examined. Children's uses of the different forms of Go were compared with respect to syntactic structure and the semantics encoded. The data are compatible with the suggestion that the children were not operating with a single verb representation that differentiated between different forms of Go but rather that their knowledge of the relationship between the different forms of Go varied depending on the structure produced and the meaning encoded. However, a good predictor of the children's use of different forms of Go in particular structures and to express particular meanings was the frequency of use of those structures and meanings with particular forms of Go in the input. The implications of these findings for theories of syntactic category formation and abstract rule-based descriptions of grammar are discussed.

AGENTIVE VERBS OF MANNER OF MOTION IN SPANISH AND ENGLISH AS SECOND LANGUAGES

This article presents two experiments that examine the effects of the native language (L1) on the second language (L2) acquisition of argument structure. The linguistic focus is on agentive verbs of directed motion (march, walk) and change-of-state verbs (break, melt) in Spanish and English. Agentive verbs of directed motion undergo a transitivity alternation in English when there is a prepositional phrase (The captain marched the soldiers to the tents) but not in Spanish (*El capitán marchó a los soldados hasta el campamento). Two experiments are reported that examine whether Spanish and Turkish learners of English at the intermediate level undergeneralize the transitivity alternation with manner-of-motion verbs, and whether English learners of Spanish overgeneralize the alternation. In both experiments subjects performed a picture judgment task and a grammaticality judgment task. Results confirmed that the L1 constrains the acquisition of argument structure: There were overgeneralization errors with manner-of-motion verbs in the Spanish study and there were undergeneralization errors with these verbs in the English study. Learnability implications are discussed.

ASPECTS OF ARGUMENT STRUCTURE ACQUISITION IN INUKTITUT.Shanley E. M. Allen. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1996. Pp. xvii + 248. $79.00 cloth.

The acquisition of Native American languages is an area of study in which there is still much work to be done, and this is especially true of Inuit languages. That alone makes Shanley Allen's Aspects of argument structure acquisition in Inuktitut a welcome addition to the list of publications on first language learning. The book is not, however, strictly intended for those who study Native American language acquisition. The extensive background information provided, both theoretical and methodological, makes Allen's work accessible to linguists with various interests. Furthermore, although her analysis is based largely on principles and parameters theory, she deliberately makes her research amenable to a variety of theoretical frameworks.

The L2 acquisition of dative experiencer subjects

This longitudinal experimental study is concerned with the L2 acquisition of argument structure and its relationship with Case Theory. French ( n = 17) and English ( n = 19) intermediate learners of Spanish as a Second Language were tested three times over a period of eight months on their knowledge of dative experiencers. Eighteen Spanish native speakers acted as a control group. Dative experiencers in Spanish are common with a subset of psych verbs and unaccusative predicates. These experiencers look like indirect objects on the surface, and indeed can appear in the position of indirect objects. Most of the time, however, they appear in canonical subject position and behave like subjects for some modules of the grammar, such as Control PRO in adjunct clauses. It was hypothesized that if a thematic hierarchy is operative in SLA,both English and French learners would have no difficulty interpreting experiencers as subjects, but that English learners would experience greater difficulty with dative case because there is no dative case in English.An Interpretation Task and a Preference Task were designed to test these hypotheses. Results indicate that,whereas both groups of subjects have access to the thematic hierarchy (a UG component),L1 influence plays an important role with case assignment and checking.

Learning and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure

Learning and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure

Book reviews : Learnability and cognition: the acquisition of argument structure

Book reviews : Learnability and cognition: the acquisition of argument structure

Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure

Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure