Mapping Of Verbs Research Articles

Fast mapping of verbs in Afrikaans-speaking children from low and mid socioeconomic backgrounds and children with language impairment

ABSTRACT Children with LI are at a disadvantage because they typically have smaller vocabularies than their TD peers. However, children from low-SES households often also have smaller vocabularies and can thus be misdiagnosed with LI. The purpose of this study was to compare the fast-mapping (FM) skills of 3 groups of 4- to 9-year-olds: typically developing (TD) children with low socioeconomic status (SES) and mid SES, and mid-SES children with language impairment (LI), to ascertain whether FM is affected by SES. The FM items of the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation were administered to 253 TD mid-SES children, 75 TD low-SES children, and 36 children with LI. On FM with novel verbs, the TD groups differed significantly (p = .001) as did the TD mid-SES and LI groups (p = .046), but not the TD low-SES and LI groups (p = 1.00). On a comparable task with real verbs, the TD mid-SES group also differed significantly from the TD low-SES (p < .001) and LI group (p = .018), with no significant difference between the latter two groups (p = 1.00). FM has been proposed as a non-SES-sensitive measure but, unlike previous studies, we found FM to be affected by SES, rendering it an insufficiently unbiased measure for our sample of children. Further thought should be given to measures that can successfully differentiate between children with LI, and children from low-SES backgrounds, possibly rendering scores adjusted for SES, so that targeted intervention can be offered.

Rhyme and Word Placement in Storybooks Support High-Level Verb Mapping in 3- to 5-Year-Olds.

High-level verbs can be especially challenging for young children to initially map to meaning. This study manipulated the format of a storybook designed to support such verb learning from shared reading. We tested whether 3- to 5-year-olds (n = 38) could remember the referents of eight new verbs when presented as essential actions within a narrative story but with differences in placement. Children were randomly assigned to either a rhymed condition, in which target verbs were heard at the end of rhyming stanzas making them maximally appreciable, or a control condition, where the verbs were presented in the same story, but not in final position or within a rhymed stanza. After hearing the story, each child was given three sets of retention questions testing their identification, demonstration, and production of the target verbs. Children identified and successfully demonstrated more target verbs in the rhymed condition than the control condition, and only in the rhymed condition did children’s initial verb mappings exceed chance. No differences between conditions were found in children’s ability to produce the target verbs, in part because of how often they reverted to more generic terms to describe the actions in the story. Nonetheless, these findings support the hypothesis that giving children maximal support within a storybook reading context can facilitate an initial grasp on challenging verbs.

Does lexical stress influence 17-month-olds' mapping of verbs and nouns?

English-learning infants attend to lexical stress when learning new words. Attention to lexical stress might be beneficial for word learning by providing an indication of the grammatical class of that word. English disyllabic nouns commonly have trochaic (strong-weak) stress, whereas English disyllabic verbs commonly have iambic (weak-strong) stress. We explored whether 17-month-old infants use word stress to resolve an ambiguous labeling event where objects and actions are equally plausible referents. Infants were habituated to 2 words paired with 2 objects, with each object performing a distinct path action. They were subsequently tested on (a) a change in object but not path action or (b) a change in path action but not the object. When infants were taught verb-friendly iambic labels, their looking times increased both when the action switched and when the object switched. Infants who were taught noun-friendly trochaic labels demonstrated an increase in looking time only when the object switched. These results demonstrate that in ambiguous labeling events infants map iambic labels to both actions and objects, and trochaic labels to the objects but not to the actions, suggesting a bias for words with trochaic stress to refer to objects. Seventeen-month-old infants can use trochaic lexical stress to guide their word learning in ambiguous situations, but iambic stress cues may not preferentially guide infants' mappings of actions or objects. (PsycINFO Database Record

Encouraging Collocational and Colligational Fluency: Pedagogical Chunking, Word and Verb Mapping, Pause Reading and Other Strategies

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to provide an exploratory overview of second-language classroom activities that can be used in order to stimulate students’ collocational and colligational fluency. For at least two decades, it has been acknowledged in second language vocabulary acquisition research that lexical proficiency extends beyond knowledge of single words, and thus, learners should be given exposure to longer stretches of language, i.e., what is sometimes referred to as “chunks”. After briefly discussing the motivation behind this theoretical stance, this paper will present and discuss a range of strategies that learners can successfully employ to notice, store and actively produce the many multi-word expressions that make up the bulk of language in use. The relevance of the current study lies primarily in its pedagogical implications. The selection of strategies has been based on a review of the current literature into the teaching of phraseology as well as the author’s own reflective practice. One of the main findings to emerge from this paper is that though many strategies have been suggested, only a small minority has been subjected to empirical or experimental verification, and that practitioners like curriculum developers, materials writers and teachers should be advised to judge the available array of activities critically.

A Cross-Linguistic Study of Sound Symbolism in Children's Verb Learning

A long history of research has considered the role of iconicity in language and the existence and role of nonarbitrary properties in language and the use of language. Previous studies with Japanese-speaking children, whose language defines a large grammatical class of words with clear sound symbolism, suggest that iconicity properties in Japanese may aid early verb learning, and a recent extended work suggests that such early sensitivity is not limited to children whose language supports such word classes. The present study further considers the use of sound-symbolic words in verb-learning context by conducting systematic cross-linguistic comparisons on early exposure to and effect of sound symbolism in verb mapping. Experiment 1 is an observational study of how English- and Japanese-speaking parents talk about verbs. More conventionalized symbolic words were found in Japanese-speaking parental input, and more idiosyncratic use of sound symbolism was found in English-speaking parental input. Despite this different exposure of iconic forms to describe actions, the artificial verb-learning task in Experiment 2 revealed that children in both language groups benefit from sound–meaning correspondences for their verb learning. These results together confirm more extensive use of conventionalized sound symbolism among Japanese speakers and also support a cross-linguistic consistency of the effect, which has been documented in the recent work. The work also points to the potential value of understanding the contexts in which sound–meaning correspondences matter in language learning.

Verbs and attention to relational roles in English and Tamil

English-learning children have been shown to reliably use cues from argument structure in learning verbs. However, languages pair overtly expressed arguments with verbs to varying extents, raising the question of whether children learning all languages expect the same, universal mapping between arguments and relational roles. Three experiments examined this question by asking how strongly early-learned verbs by themselves, without their corresponding explicitly expressed arguments, point to 'conceptual arguments' - the relational roles in a scene. Children aged two to four years and adult speakers of two languages that differ structurally in terms of whether the arguments of a verb are explicitly expressed more (English) or less (Tamil) frequently were compared in their mapping of verbs, presented without any overtly expressed arguments, to a range of scenes. The results suggest different developmental trajectories for language learners, as well as different patterns of adult interpretation, and offer new ways of thinking about the nature of verbs cross-linguistically.

Action Speaks Louder Than Words: Young Children Differentially Weight Perceptual, Social, and Linguistic Cues to Learn Verbs

This paper explores how children use two possible solutions to the verb-mapping problem: attention to perceptually salient actions and attention to social and linguistic information (speaker cues). Twenty-two-month-olds attached a verb to one of two actions when perceptual cues (presence/absence of a result) coincided with speaker cues but not when these cues were placed into conflict (Experiment 1), and not when both possible referent actions were perceptually salient (Experiment 2). By 34 months, children were able to override perceptual cues to learn the name of an action that was not perceptually salient (Experiment 3). Results demonstrate an early reliance on perceptual information for verb mapping and an emerging tendency to weight speaker information more heavily over developmental time.

Structural limits on verb mapping: the role of abstract structure in 2.5‐year‐olds’ interpretations of novel verbs

AbstractTwo experiments showed that 2.5‐year‐olds, as well as older children, interpret new verbs in accord with their number of arguments. When interpreting new verbs describing the same motion events, children who heard transitive sentences were more likely than were children who heard intransitive sentences to assume that the verb referred to the actions of the causal agent. The sentences were designed so that only the number of noun‐phrase arguments differed across conditions (e.g. She’s pilking her over there versus She’s pilking over there). These experiments isolate number of noun‐phrase arguments (or number of nouns) as an early constraint on sentence interpretation and verb learning, and provide strong evidence that children as young as 2.5 years of age attend to a sentence’s overall structure in interpreting it.

Fast mapping of verbs by children with specific language impairment

Two studies examined preschoolers' ability to assign verb interpretations to nonsense words encountered in conjunction with novel actions. Experiment 1 examined the ability of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and younger, normally developing peers to glean a verb interpretation when the name of the figure performing the novel action was already known. The two groups of children performed in a similar, accurate fashion. Experiment 2 required pre-schoolers to rely exclusively on morphosyntactic information to determine whether the novel word represented an object or action. When provided with redundant morphosyntactic cues, children with SLI and language- and age-matched peers succeeded in identifying the novel words that referred to objects but not those that referred to actions. Only the age-matched normal peers were above chance levels when a noun interpretation depended on a single grammatical morpheme (e.g., 'We want the koob ' versus 'We want to koob '). The findings suggest that preschoolers, whether or not they have language impairment, have difficulty using morphosyntactic information to bootstrap verbs. Furthermore, redundant but not single morphosyntactic cues facilitate the bootstrapping of nouns.

The effects of inflectional variation on fast mapping of verbs in English and Spanish.

To use morphological cues for syntactic bootstrapping, children must recognize that inflectionally varying words (e.g., pushes, pushed) are instances of the same word. Children who are exposed to languages with richer inflectional morphologies than English, such as Spanish, encounter instances of inflectional variation more often. Thus they may learn to recognize inflectionally varying words as instances of the same word at an earlier age than do learners of English. English-and Spanish-learning 3-year olds were taught novel verbs in a fast mapping task under two conditions: no-inflectional variation in which inflections did not vary between exposure and testing (e.g., neps, neps) and inflectional variation in which inflections alternated between exposure and testing (e.g., neps, nepped). Children's scores were significantly higher in the no-variation condition than in the variation condition. There were no significant differences between the performance of the language groups. These findings suggest that even children acquiring languages with relatively rich verbal inflection paradigms may not be able to consistently parse stems and inflections to associate inflectionally varying forms.

Structural Limits on Verb Mapping: The Role of Analogy in Children's Interpretations of Sentences

The structure of sentences in which a verb is used can provide hints about its meaning (Landau & Gleitman, 1985). One possible view of how this works appeals to innate rules linking grammatical categories with semantic ones (e.g., if subject then agent). However, this view requires considerable syntactic knowledge on the part of the child to use structural cues; The child must already be able to identify the grammatical parts of a sentence—in a particular language—in order to gain access to such rules. In this paper I propose an alternative route from structure to verb meaning and present evidence for its use. A task was devised to deny preschoolers access to linking rules like “if subject then agent,” by not identifying the subject. In three experiments, children learned novel verbs in different sentence contexts. The identity of the subject and object of each sentence was hidden by using ambiguous pronouns (e.g.,sheandher). Thus only the number of arguments (transitive vs intransitive sentences) and their marking by preposition (tovsfrom) could provide cues to verb meaning. Meanings were assessed by asking children to point to the one performing the labeled action. Children's choices revealed sensitivity to both number and marking of arguments. These results suggest that very little explicit syntactic knowledge is needed to give children some structural cues to verb meaning. I suggest that a sentence structure has an abstract, relational meaning of its own, independent of the identity of its arguments, that can be applied by analogy to the child's conceptual representation of an event.

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

We ask how children solve the mapping problem for verb acquisition: how they pair concepts with their phonological realizations in their language. There is evidence that nouns but not verbs can be acquired by pairing each sound (e.g., ‘elephant’) with a concept inferred from the world circumstances in which that sound occurs. Verb meanings pose problems for this word-world mapping procedure, motivating a model of verb mapping mediated by attention to the syntactic structures in which verbs occur (Landau and Gleitman 1985, Gleitman 1990). We present an experiment examining the interaction between a conceptual influence (the bias to interpret observed situations as involving a casual agent) and syntactic influences, as these jointly contribute to children's conjectures about new verb meanings. Children were shown scenes ambiguous as to two interpretations (e.g., giving and getting or chasing and fleeing) and were asked to guess the meaning of novel verbs used to described the scenes, presented in varying syntactic contexts. Both conceptual and syntactic constraints influenced children's responses, but syntactic information largely overwhelmed the conceptual bias. This finding, with collatoral evidence, supports a syntax-mediated procedure for verb acquisition.

Syllabification and prosodic templates in Yawelmani

This article addresses the interaction of syllabification and templatic morphology in Yawelmani. The morphological templates (in CV terms, CVCC, CVVCC, and CVCVVC) do not parse directly into well-formed Yawelmani surface syllables (CV, CVV, CVC). Nonetheless, as argued here, these templates can be expressed in terms of legitimate prosodic units, thereby supporting the prosodic morphology hypothesis (McCarthy and Prince 1986, 1987, 1990). The basic idea is that segments map from left to right to the template, but if a template is too small, any leftover stem consonants simply undergo right to left syllabification. This analysis accounts for the general templatic mapping of verbs and nouns as well as the different kinds of reduplication in Yawelmani. It also provides a more explanatory account of the ‘ghost’ consonants — initial consonants of some of the suffixes which surface only when the stem is biconsonantal, but not if the stem is larger. The analysis not only provides support for the prosodic morphology hypothesis, it also argues in favor of a templatic view of syllabification (Ito 1986, 1989) and a rule of Weight-by-Position (Hayes 1989) operating independently of the general syllabification process.

Machine and web translator for English to Bangla using natural language processes

The modern web contents are mostly written in English and developing a system with the facility of translating web pages from English to Bangla that can aid the massive number of people of Bangladesh. It is very important to introduce Natural Language Processing (NLP) and is required to developing a solution of web translator. It is a technique that deals with understanding natural languages and natural language generation. It is really a challenging job to building a Web Translator with 100% efficiency and our proposed Web Translator basically uses Machine Translator as its mother concern. This paper represents an optimal way for English to Bangla machine and the Web translation &amp; translation methods are used by translator. Naturally there are three stages for MT but here we propose a translation system which includes 4 stages, such as, POS tagging, Generating parse tree, Transfer English parse tree to Bengali parse tree and Translate English to Bangla and apply AI. An innovation initiative has scope of being upgraded in future and hopefully this work will assist to develop more improved English to Bangla Web Translator. Keywords: Machine Translator, Web Translator, POS Tagging, Parsing, HTML Parsing, Verb Mapping DOI: 10.3329/diujst.v5i1.4382 Daffodil International University Journal of Science and Technology Vol.5(1) 2010 pp.53-61