Constrained Flexibility in the Extension of Novel Causative Verbs

Bunger, Ann; Lidz, Jeffrey

doi:10.3765/bls.v32i1.3442

Cited by 10 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 11 publications

(3 reference statements)

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“…Alternatively, children and adults might differ in terms of conceptual event encoding: adults, but not children, might have thought that the Results depicted in our pictures were central to the core of a causative event. Consistent with this hypothesis, prior studies have shown that adults have a strong bias for Results when categorizing or learning about causative events (e.g., Papafragou & Selimis, 2010) but children present a mixed picture, taking the activity of an agent (Casasola & Cohen, 2000), the result (Bunger, Baier & Lidz, 2009), or neither/both (Papafragou & Selimis, 2010) to be the core of a causative event. Because there were several differences among these past studies in terms of the stimuli and methods used, this issue remains ripe for further investigation.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 64%

How children and adults encode causative events cross-linguistically: implications for language production and attention

Bunger

Skordos

Trueswell

et al. 2016

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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This study investigates the implications of language-specific constraints on linguistic event encoding for the description and on-line inspection of causative events. English-speaking and Greek-speaking adults, 3-year-olds, and 4-year-olds viewed and described causative events, which are composed of Means and Result subevents, in an eyetracking study. The results demonstrate cross-linguistic differences in the informational content of causative event descriptions: Greek speakers across age groups were more likely than English speakers to mention only one causative subevent. Developmental changes in the tendency to encode information about causative events in language were also evident: in both language groups, adults were more likely than children to mention both Means and Result subevents. Finally, for both adult and child speakers of both languages, preparing different types of event descriptions changed the way that events were visually inspected, shifting attention toward to-be-encoded subevents. These findings offer some of the first evidence about the development of the language production system, the attentional mechanisms that it employs, and its workings in speakers of different languages.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 64%

How children and adults encode causative events cross-linguistically: implications for language production and attention

Bunger

Skordos

Trueswell

et al. 2016

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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“…First, children have been shown to use animacy as a cue in verb learning at as early as 2-3 years (Becker, 2007;Bunger & Lidz, 2006). While it is no doubt possible that children have a higher proportion of semantic features misrepresented than phonological ones, and that semantic incompetence makes some contribution to children's performance, it does not seem likely that at this age, these basic semantic features would be so regularly misrepresented.…”

Section: Hypothesis 1: Misrepresentationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling Statistical Insensitivity: Sources of Suboptimal Behavior

2016

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Children acquiring languages with noun classes (grammatical gender) have ample statistical information available that characterizes the distribution of nouns into these classes, but their use of this information to classify novel nouns differs from the predictions made by an optimal Bayesian classifier. We use rational analysis to investigate the hypothesis that children are classifying nouns optimally with respect to a distribution that does not match the surface distribution of statistical features in their input. We propose three ways in which children's apparent statistical insensitivity might arise, and find that all three provide ways to account for the difference between children's behavior and the optimal classifier. A fourth model combines two of these proposals and finds that children's insensitivity is best modeled as a bias to ignore certain features during classification, rather than an inability to encode those features during learning. These results provide insight into children's developing knowledge of noun classes and highlight the complex ways in which statistical information from the input interacts with children's learning processes.

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“…At roughly 24 months, infants typically begin to add a sizeable number of verbs to their productive lexicons, and use them systematically to refer to actions (e.g., eat, run), mental states (e.g., want, see) and relations (e.g., touch, move). At this point, they also demonstrate a clear capacity to map novel verbs onto categories of events in experimental tasks, and in doing so, they take into account syntactic information, including the number and types of frames in which novel verbs appear and the relations among the noun phrases in these frames, to narrow their hypotheses about possible verb meanings (Akhtar & Tomasello, 1996; Bunger & Lidz, 2006; Fernandes, Marcus, DiNubila, & Vouloumanos, 2006; Fisher, 2002; Gertner, et al, 2006; Gleitman, 1990; Gleitman et al, 2005; Hirsch-Pasek, Golinkoff, & Naigles, 1996; Landau & Gleitman, 1985; Naigles, 1990, 1996). …”

Section: Word-learning In Infancy: Overview Of Evidencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…When the verb was presented in a transitive frame (e.g., “The duck is gorping the bunny”), infants mapped the verb to the causative component (the duck pushing the bunny); when the verb was presented in an intransitive frame (e.g., “The duck and the bunny are gorping”), infants mapped the verb to either the causative or synchronous component. This outcome reveals that infants possess at least some rudimentary knowledge of noun phrases and argument structure (e.g., distinguishing transitive from intransitive constructions) and some rudimentary expectations about how structures map to events (e.g., mapping verbs in transitive constructions to causal rather than merely synchronous events) (Bunger & Lidz, 2004, 2006; Fisher, 1996; Lidz, Gleitman & Gleitman, 2003; Naigles, 1990; Naigles & Kako 1993). In closely related work, infants have also demonstrated their sensitivity to subparts of events, like manner, path, and result (Bunger, 2007; Bunger & Lidz, 2004; Pruden, Hirsh-Pasek, Maguire, & Meyer, 2004; Pulverman, Sootsman, Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, 2003), and to other verb-relevant characteristics like intentionality and telicity (Wagner, 2002; 2006).…”

Section: Word-learning In Infancy: Overview Of Evidencementioning

confidence: 99%

Twenty four-month-old infants’ interpretations of novel verbs and nouns in dynamic scenes

Waxman

Lidz

Braun

et al. 2009

Cognitive Psychology

105

120

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The current experiments address several concerns, both empirical and theoretical in nature, that have surfaced within the verb-learning literature. They begin to reconcile what, until now, has been a large and largely unexplained gap between infants’ well-documented ability to acquire verbs in the natural course of their lives and their rather surprising failures to do so in many laboratory-based tasks. We presented 24-month-old infants with dynamic scenes (e.g., a man waving a balloon), and asked a) whether infants could construe these scenes flexibly, noticing the consistent action (e.g., waving) as well as the consistent object (e.g., the balloon) and b) whether their construals of the scenes were influenced by the grammatical form of a novel word used to describe them (verb or noun). Infants successfully mapped novel verbs to event categories (e.g., waving events) and novel nouns to object categories (e.g., balloons). Moreover, infants’ representations were sufficiently abstract to permit them to extend novel verbs and nouns appropriately beyond the precise scenes on which they had been taught.

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Constrained Flexibility in the Extension of Novel Causative Verbs

Abstract: N/A

Cited by 10 publications

References 11 publications

How children and adults encode causative events cross-linguistically: implications for language production and attention

How children and adults encode causative events cross-linguistically: implications for language production and attention

Modeling Statistical Insensitivity: Sources of Suboptimal Behavior

Twenty four-month-old infants’ interpretations of novel verbs and nouns in dynamic scenes

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