Noun Arguments Research Articles

Verb-Mediated Prediction in Bilingual Toddlers.

Prediction is an important mechanism for efficient language processing. It has been shown that as a part of sentence processing, both children and adults predict nouns based on semantically constraining verbs. Language proficiency is said to modulate prediction: the higher proficiency, the better the predictive skill. Children growing up acquiring two languages are often more proficient in one of them, and as such, investigation of the predictive ability in young bilingual children can shed light on the role of language proficiency. Furthermore, according to production-based models, the language production system drives the predictive ability. The present study investigates whether bilingual toddlers predict upcoming nouns based on verb meanings in both their languages, and whether this ability is associated with expressive vocabulary. Seventeen Norwegian-English bilingual toddlers (aged 2;5–3;3), dominant in Norwegian, participated in the study. Verb-mediated predictive ability was measured via a visual world paradigm (VWP) experiment, including sentences with semantically constraining and neutral verbs. Expressive vocabulary was measured by MacArthur-Bates CDI II. The results suggested that the toddler group predicted upcoming noun arguments in both their dominant and non-dominant languages, but were faster in their dominant language. This finding highlights the importance of language dominance for predictive processing. There was no significant relationship between predictive ability and expressive vocabulary in either language.

Verb Acquisition in English and Other Languages

Massive researches and experiments are attempting to explore the exact process of verb acquisition of child learners at an early age (1 to 3 years old). Therefore, the “syntactic bootstrapping method” is introduced and explicated in this paper, trying to illuminate whether children used syntax to learn verbs in English. Apart from English, other languages with totally different grammatical structures are also being discussed as well: regarding massive ellipsis of noun arguments (NPs) in Mandarin, researches and experiments on the acquisition of verbs in Mandarin ought to be carried out more in the near future. The purpose of this article is to give a brief introduction of word acquisition, especially verb acquisition with linguistic syntactic information; moreover, some practical hints of verb acquisition are also presented within the paper.

Young children’s sentence comprehension: Neural correlates of syntax-semantic competition

Sentence comprehension requires the assignment of thematic relations between the verb and its noun arguments in order to determine who is doing what to whom. In some languages, such as English, word order is the primary syntactic cue. In other languages, such as German, case-marking is additionally used to assign thematic roles. During development children have to acquire the thematic relevance of these syntactic cues and weigh them against semantic cues. Here we investigated the processing of syntactic cues and semantic cues in 2- and 3-year-old children by analyzing their behavioral and neurophysiological responses. Case-marked subject-first and object-first sentences (syntactic cue) including animate and inanimate nouns (semantic cue) were presented auditorily. The semantic animacy cue either conflicted with or supported the thematic roles assigned by syntactic case-marking. In contrast to adults, for whom semantics did not interfere with case-marking, children attended to both syntactic and to semantic cues with a stronger reliance on semantic cues in early development. Children’s event-related brain potentials indicated sensitivity to syntactic information but increased processing costs when case-marking and animacy assigned conflicting thematic roles. These results demonstrate an early developmental sensitivity and ongoing shift towards the use of syntactic cues during sentence comprehension.

Strict vs. free word order patterns in Korean nominal phrases and Cyclic Linearization

AbstractKorean nominal phrases display both flexibility in their internal word order and also rigidity in the sequencing of certain elements. This paper focuses on a linear ordering constraint on the occurrence of arguments of nouns which requires a strict relative sequencing of such elements, no matter where they are distributed across different locations within DPs. The paper suggests that the most appropriate mechanism to capture the complex patterns observed is Fox and Pesetsky's () Cyclic Linearization approach, which records and compares the linear ordering of elements across different Spell‐out domains. It is argued that the patterns found in Korean can be successfully captured in a Cyclic Linearization analysis if it is assumed that Korean nominal projections consist in two Spell‐out domains–DP and nP – in a way resembling the bi‐cyclic composition of clauses, and that Korean provides novel support from the syntax of nominal phrases for Cyclic Linearization, originally motivated by patterns found in clausal domains.

The end of lexicalism as we know it?

This paper is a reply to Benjamin Bruening’s article ‘The lexicalist hypothesis: Both wrong and superfluous’, which appears in this volume of Language . Bruening claims that all phenomena that have been explained with reference to the notion word should be explained with reference to the X0/XP distinction. He claims that only phrases can be extracted, which would explain the island status of words (his X0). He also claims that coordination always affects full XPs, countering an earlier argument by Steve Wechsler and me. He argues for a phrasal analysis of resultative constructions and tries to support it by the claim that all arguments of nouns are optional, and hence a lexical analysis of resultative constructions that assumes that the result predicate is selected by the verb would make wrong claims when it comes to nominalizations, since one would expect that the result predicate can be omitted like other arguments in nominalizations can be. I argue that Bruening’s X0/XP distinction cannot explain extraction differences since X0 can be extracted, that some arguments are indeed not optional in nominalizations, and that coordination may affect lexical items. I furthermore point out that morphological phenomena in languages other than English may need more machinery and different tools and that in the end it may be reasonable to assume that there is a morphology that is indeed different from syntax.

"Whatdunit?" Sentence Comprehension Abilities of Children With SLI: Sensitivity to Word Order in Canonical and Noncanonical Structures.

With Aim 1, we compared the comprehension of and sensitivity to canonical and noncanonical word order structures in school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) and same-age typically developing (TD) children. Aim 2 centered on the developmental improvement of sentence comprehension in the groups. With Aim 3, we compared the comprehension error patterns of the groups. Using a "Whatdunit" agent selection task, 117 children with SLI and 117 TD children (ages 7:0-11:11, years:months) propensity matched on age, gender, mother's education, and family income pointed to the picture that best represented the agent in semantically implausible canonical structures (subject-verb-object, subject relative) and noncanonical structures (passive, object relative). The SLI group performed worse than the TD group across sentence types. TD children demonstrated developmental improvement across each sentence type, but children with SLI showed improvement only for canonical sentences. Both groups chose the object noun as agent significantly more often than the noun appearing in a prepositional phrase. In the absence of semantic-pragmatic cues, comprehension of canonical and noncanonical sentences by children with SLI is limited, with noncanonical sentence comprehension being disproportionately limited. The children's ability to make proper semantic role assignments to the noun arguments in sentences, especially noncanonical, is significantly hindered.

Els arguments interns directes dels noms en català: aproximació teoricodescriptiva

It is widely known that there is nowadays a certain consensus on the idea that nominal constructions, like sentences, are constrained by a series of restrictions that structure the relation between the head and the modifiers. This implies that some nouns, like verbs, admit arguments. This paper is based on the idea that syntactic structure is built upon categorially neutral roots to try to explain the fact that verbs and nouns are parallel regarding argument structure. Evidence from a corpus of Catalan language (CTILC) is given to prove how this is true at least regarding internal argument structure. Moreover, nouns of all aspectual types are analyzed, as well as nouns admitting different kinds of complements, so as to describe which factors are relevant in the realization of internal arguments of nouns and nominalizations in Catalan.

The relation between thematic role computing and semantic relatedness processing during on-line sentence comprehension.

Sentence comprehension involves timely computing different types of relations between its verbs and noun arguments, such as morphosyntactic, semantic, and thematic relations. Here, we used EEG technique to investigate the potential differences in thematic role computing and lexical-semantic relatedness processing during on-line sentence comprehension, and the interaction between these two types of processes. Mandarin Chinese sentences were used as materials. The basic structure of those sentences is “Noun+Verb+‘le’+a two-character word”, with the Noun being the initial argument. The verb disambiguates the initial argument as an agent or a patient. Meanwhile, the initial argument and the verb are highly or lowly semantically related. The ERPs at the verbs revealed that: relative to the agent condition, the patient condition evoked a larger N400 only when the argument and verb were lowly semantically related; however, relative to the high-relatedness condition, the low-relatedness condition elicited a larger N400 regardless of the thematic relation; although both thematic role variation and semantic relatedness variation elicited N400 effects, the N400 effect elicited by the former was broadly distributed and reached maximum over the frontal electrodes, and the N400 effect elicited by the latter had a posterior distribution. In addition, the brain oscillations results showed that, although thematic role variation (patient vs. agent) induced power decreases around the beta frequency band (15–30 Hz), semantic relatedness variation (low-relatedness vs. high-relatedness) induced power increases in the theta frequency band (4–7 Hz). These results suggested that, in the sentence context, thematic role computing is modulated by the semantic relatedness between the verb and its argument; semantic relatedness processing, however, is in some degree independent from the thematic relations. Moreover, our results indicated that, during on-line sentence comprehension, thematic role computing and semantic relatedness processing are mediated by distinct neural systems.

Constraining argument structure in nominalizations: The case of English -er

The article contributes to the typology of structural factors constraining argument realization in nominalizations, focussing on English –er-nominals. It reappraises conclusions of earlier studies on when –er-nominals allow argument realization. Derivations disallowing argument linking are treated as semantically and structurally parallel to nominal compounds, and their argument-structural behaviour is attributed to a generalization that non-heads of base-generated complex heads cannot realize arguments, with principled exceptions. In argument-realizing –er-nominals, some speakers allow the full range of argument structures permitted by head movement analyses, while less liberal varieties require a (lexicalist-inspired but syntactically implemented) analysis where –er is an Agent-realizing affix that selects V°, forcing arguments of V to merge above affixation as arguments of nouns, which is only possible for PP and of-insertion arguments.

Revisiting Chinese-speaking children's understanding of argument structure

A causative verb is likely to appear in a sentence with two noun arguments, whereas a noncausative verb tends to appear in a sentence with a single argument. The present research investigates from what point children learning Chinese begin to show this knowledge of argument structure. Two-, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children were tested using a forced-choice pointing task. The results showed that Chinese-speaking children aged 2 years could associate a transitive construction with a causative event, whereas they were not able to map an intransitive construction to a noncausative event even after reaching 5 years of age. The reason why Chinese children have such difficulty in learning knowledge of intransitive construction is discussed, focusing on (a) the semantic properties of certain intransitive verbs, which have been found not only in Chinese but also in other languages, and (b) the ellipsis of arguments, which is characteristic of Chinese.

A comparison of word versus sentence cues as therapy for verb naming in aphasia

Background: Improving verb naming in people with aphasia should enable expession of a wider range of sentence types and meanings, and may have wider benefits for connected speech. Estableshing the optimal therapy methods for improving verb naming is, therefore, of substantial clinical importance. Aims: This study investigated whether cueing sentence production would improve verb‐naming accuracy to a greater extent than the more typical, single‐word verb‐cueing therapies. A second aim was to examine the extent to which verb picture naming improvements would generalise to naming of the same items in dynamic videos. Methods & Procedures: Seven participants with chronic aphasia including word retrieval impairment took part in a case‐series study. Decreasing cues were used to devise two therapies to improve verb naming: word cue therapy and sentence cue therapy. A total of 60 verbs that had not been named accurately in baseline testing on three presentations were collated for each participant. These were split into three sets of 20 verbs: set A was used in word cue therapy, set B in sentence cue therapy, and set C served as control items undergoing no therapy. The sets were matched for significant psycholinguistic variables such as word frequency, imageability, length, and number of noun arguments. Therapy consisted of 10 sessions over 5 weeks. Post‐therapy assessments consisted of an immediate naming assessment (1 week following therapy) and a follow‐up assessment 5 weeks later. Naming of the target verbs in set A for each participant was also assessed using a dynamic video presentation. Outcomes & Results: Both therapies resulted in highly significant gains in naming accuracy for treated verbs with little, if any, carry‐over to untreated verbs. There were no significant differences between the therapies for individual participants. At the group level there was a significantly greater benefit for word cue over sentence cue therapy at the follow‐up naming assessment. The gains in verb naming post therapy generalised from the static depictions used in therapy to naming of the same items in the dynamic video presentation format. Conclusions: Both word and sentence cue therapy for verb naming were effective in improving naming accuracy. Gains from word cue therapy can generalise to naming of very different exemplars of the same verb targets. Word cue therapy resulted in significantly greater gains than sentence cues at the level of the group, but the difference was not substantial enough to be significant at the individual participant level. Generalisation, as an effect following intervention, can be examined in terms of naming different exemplars of a word, as well as its more typical meaning of generalisation from treated to untreated items in therapy.

IMPROVING WORD SENSE DISAMBIGUATION WITH AUTOMATICALLY RETRIEVED SEMANTIC KNOWLEDGE

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is an important problem in Natural Language Processing. Supervised WSD involves assigning a sense from some sense inventory to each occurrence of an ambiguous word. Verb sense distinctions often depend on the distinctions in the semantics of the target verb's arguments. Therefore, some method of capturing their semantics is crucial to the success of a VSD system. In this paper we propose a novel approach to encoding the semantics of the noun arguments of a verb. This approach involves extracting various semantic properties of that verb from a large text corpus. We contrast our approach with the traditional methods and show that it performs better while the only resources it requires are a large corpus and a dependency parser.

Mandarin learners use syntactic bootstrapping in verb acquisition

Mandarin Chinese allows pervasive ellipsis of noun arguments (NPs) in discourse, which casts doubt concerning child learners’ use of syntax in verb learning. This study investigated whether Mandarin learning children would nonetheless extend verb meanings based on the number of NPs in sentences. Forty-one Mandarin-speaking two- and three-year-olds enacted sentences with familiar motion verbs. The presence of an extra postverbal NP led the toddlers to extend causative meanings to intransitive verbs, and the absence of a postverbal NP led them to extend noncausative meanings to transitive verbs. The effects of adding or subtracting an NP were statistically indistinguishable. Thus, the number of NPs in a sentence appears to play a role in verb learning in Mandarin Chinese.

Argument Structure Enhanced Verb Naming Treatment: Two Case Studies

This study examined the effect of a verb naming treatment on verb retrieval and sentence production in two Broca's aphasic individuals. The treatment approach focused on exploiting the association between a verb and its noun arguments to enhance naming. Results indicate that the treatment was effective in facilitating verb naming. As predicted, there was no generalization to control verbs, however, generalization to sentence production was demonstrated in the treatment context in one and spontaneous speech in both participants. Overall, the results confirm the hypothesis that training verbs along with its noun arguments improve not only single verb naming but also sentence production in some individuals with aphasia.

What does syntax say about space? 2-year-olds use sentence structure to learn new prepositions

Children as young as two use sentence structure to learn the meanings of verbs. We probed the generality of sensitivity to sentence structure by moving to a different semantic and syntactic domain, spatial prepositions. Twenty-six-month-olds used sentence structure to determine whether a new word was an object-category name ( This is a corp!) or a spatial-relational term ( This is acorp my box!). We argue that children rely on the intimate relationship between nouns in sentences and semantic arguments of predicate terms: Noting that a new word takes noun arguments identifies the new word as a predicate term, and directs the child's attention to relations among its arguments.

Selectional restriction and semantic priming effects in normals and Broca's aphasics

Three experiments explored the extent to which patterns of abnormal comprehension in Broca's aphasia can be attributed to a disruption of information encoded in the selectional restrictions of verbs. An auditory lexical decision paradigm was used to examine sensitivity to selectional restriction relations between verbs and their noun arguments as well as to associative semantic relations. Experiment I explored these effects at the lexical level. Experiment II examined these effects in a simple syntactic context, and Experiment III compared these effects in grammatical and ungrammatical sentence contexts. Both normal and Broca's aphasic subjects showed sensitivity to selectional restrictions and semantic associates in both lexical and sentential contexts. However, although Broca's aphasics did show sensitivity to selectional restriction information associated with verbs, unlike normal subjects they failed to show a selection restriction effect in ungrammatical sentences, suggesting that access to selectional restriction information was less stable than access to semantic associative information. Implications of the results for normals and Broca's aphasics are discussed in relation to parallel and serial theories of sentence processing and to lexically based theories of aphasic language comprehension deficits.

The Input to Verb Learning in Mandarin Chinese: A Role for Syntactic Bootstrapping.

The authors investigated the role of syntax in verb learning in Mandarin Chinese, which allows pervasive ellipsis of noun arguments. Two questions were investigated using the Beijing corpus on CHILDES: (a) Does the input to young children manifest syntactic-semantic correspondences as needed for acquiring verb meanings? (b) Are verbs presented in multiple frames? Over 6,000 child-directed utterances were parsed. Analyses revealed that transitive verbs, motion verbs, and internal/communication verbs were distinguished syntactically; moreover, the 60 target verbs were used in multiple sentence frames. These findings support a role for syntactic bootstrapping in Mandarin verb learning.

Semantic Influences on Thematic Role Assignment: Evidence from Normals and Aphasics

We report two studies that examine the role of semantic influences in the assignment of thematic roles. Semantic factors were manipulated by contrasting sentences in which one noun argument was a plausible filler of only one thematic role (e.g., the painting inThe artist disliked the painting) with sentences in which both noun arguments were plausible fillers of both thematic roles (e.g.,The robin ate the insect). Subjects were required to make plausibility judgments to sentences presented auditorily. Experiment 1 examined RTs of normal subjects on the plausibility judgment task. In Experiment 2, the same sentences were presented to aphasic patients identified as “asyntactic” comprehenders. In Experiment 1, RTs were speeded by semantic constraints on thematic assignment, particularly when the role-constrained NP occurred early in the sentence (as inThe painting was disliked by the artist). The aphasic performance patterns in Experiment 2 paralleled those of normal subjects, but in greatly exaggerated fashion. The patients exhibited high error rates on sentences where semantic constraints conflicted with the syntactically based assignments, even on sentences with canonical (S-V-O) word order (e.g., #The deer shot the hunter).

Words that are their opposites: Noun to verb conversion in English

This article investigates the semantic properties of English denominal locative verbs, exploring specifically their capability of expressing opposite meanings. Locative denominal verbs pattern themselves systematically into distinct groups based on underlying syntactic behavior as well as on the semantic property of affectedness on noun arguments. The article argues that the properties of affectedness, agenthood, and the notion of preexisting state constrain the possible semantics of these verbs and shed some light on the way these verbs are organized in our mental lexicon around denominals prefixed by the morphemes un- and de-.

Verb Retrieval in Aphasia. 2. Relationship to Sentence Processing

Sentence comprehension and production were evaluated for 10 chronic aphasic patients who have been shown to demonstrate one of three patterns in the relative ease of retrieval of nouns and verbs. Although these patterns of noun/verb production were not entirely predictable from patients' clinical classifications, they were found here to be significantly correlated with several structural indices of sentence production and with failure to comprehend semantically reversible sentences. Noun/verb retrieval patterns were not strongly correlated with speech fluency nor with morphological characteristics of sentence production. Patients with relative impairment in the production of verbs were found to rely on high frequency, semantically empty, “light” verbs when producing sentences and to favor simple syntactic structures in which verbs do not require inflections. When forced to produce substantive verbs (in picture and scene descriptions), verb retrieval continued to undermine the production of well-formed sentences for the verb-impaired patients. In addition, two of five such patients also showed some evidence of poor realization of noun arguments for verbs they could not produce. Results are interpreted as indicating multiple contribution to patients' sentence processing impairments, one of which may be selective difficulty retrieving verbs.