Do What You Know: “Semantic Scaffolding” in Biclausal Raising and Control

Abstract

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Comparing solutions to the linking problem using an integrated quantitative framework of language acquisition

“…This behavior is different for raising object verbs (with utterances like "The boy wanted the cake to be chocolate"), where both ages of children were at chance for accepting the utterances as "okay". Similarly, as also reported in Kirby (2009aKirby ( , 2010, four-and five-year-olds treat control object and raising object verbs differently when judging the acceptability of expletive subjects in the embedded clause (e.g., control object: *The girl told it to be warm, raising object: The girl wanted there to be cookies in the bag.). Adult-like judgments do vary by age: four-year-olds only have adult judgments for control object verbs and reject expletive subjects while five-year-olds only have adult judgments for raising object verbs and accept expletive subjects.…”

“…Additionally, as reported in Kirby (2009aKirby ( , 2010, both four-and five-year-olds are sensitive to the animacy restrictions for control object verbs (and reject utterances like "Elmo told the toys to be smaller" as "weird" more often than chance). This behavior is different for raising object verbs (with utterances like "The boy wanted the cake to be chocolate"), where both ages of children were at chance for accepting the utterances as "okay".…”

“…Second, animacy for each NP argument was annotated by hand. We included animacy because a number of acquisition studies have demonstrated that animacy is a useful cue for learning verb classes (Scott & Fisher, 2009;Becker, 2009;Kirby, 2009aKirby, , 2010Becker & Estigarribia, 2013;Becker, 2014Becker, , 2015Hartshorne et al, 2015). Third, thematic roles for the arguments of each verb (except the copula be) were annotated by hand using 13 thematic role labels that are common in the literature (again, see the readme file mentioned above for details).…”

“…Animacy is something young children are known to both be sensitive to as a general property and also use as a cue in experimental studies to predict how verbs will behave (Scott & Fisher, 2009;Becker, 2009;Kirby, 2009aKirby, , 2010Becker, 2014Becker, , 2015Hartshorne et al, 2015). Moreover, if children are able to harness animacy effectively in their input, it's possible to use the animacy of a verb's arguments (in particular, whether the argument is inanimate) to distinguish verb behaviors such as those associated with subject-raising, subject-control, objectraising, and object-control (Kirby, 2009a(Kirby, , 2010Becker & Estigarribia, 2013;Becker, 2014). One way to implement this conceptual information is for the verb's NP arguments to be labeled as +/-animate, as in (6b).…”

The acceptability judgment of Chinese pseudo-modifiers with and without a sentential context

“…In addition, it has been repeatedly shown that semantic information can be referred to in the absence of clear syntactic knowledge and/or processing power in both production and interpretation of infrequent expressions, such as garden path sentences (e.g., [34]) or sentences involving complex clausal structure (e.g., [35]). In these situations, semantic acceptability could function independently of syntactic judgments in support of production and comprehension [36]. This phenomenon has been recorded in both first and second language processing/learning of adults and children (e.g., [36–38]).…”