Hard Words

Gleitman, Lila R.; Cassidy, Kimberly Wright; Nappa, Rebecca; Papafragou, Anna; Trueswell, John C.

doi:10.1207/s15473341lld0101_4

Cited by 434 publications

(389 citation statements)

References 84 publications

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“…These properties heavily influence response style for novel words in both adult and child learners. The results thus bolster a position we have also urged elsewhere, to the effect that the character of novice vocabulary is most naturally explained as having more to do with inherent properties of a learning procedure than with significant early gaps in the conceptual repertoire (Gleitman et al, 2005). From this perspective, young children are just a special case of novice learners.…”

Section: Summary and Discussion Of The Findingssupporting

confidence: 70%

“…They occur primarily in transitive or simple intransitive frames, which are themselves associated with a broad range of verb meanings; consequently, these frames provide little constraint on the kind of verb that can appear in them. For these kinds of verb, extra-linguistic information is the more useful in breaking into their meanings (Snedeker & Gleitman, 2004;Gleitman et al, 2005). Our first experimental prediction follows from these considerations:…”

Section: A Proposal For How Mental Verbs Are Acquiredmentioning

confidence: 85%

“…Structural contributions to belief verb learning-A key to acquiring abstract words is the construction of language-internal evidentiary sources during the first few years of life (for a fuller description of such machinery, see Gleitman, Cassidy, Nappa, Papafragou, & Trueswell, 2005;Trueswell & Gleitman, in press). One such source is a growing database of linguistic co-occurrence information by means of which the learner can narrow the referential domain of new items (for instance, the co-occurrence of eat with edibles and drink with potables; Harris, 1951;Resnick, 1996; and see Altmann & Kamide, 1999 for recent experimental evidence).…”

Section: A Proposal For How Mental Verbs Are Acquiredmentioning

confidence: 99%

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When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs

2007

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Mental-content verbs such as think, believe, imagine and hope seem to pose special problems for the young language learner. One possible explanation for these difficulties is that the concepts that these verbs express are hard to grasp and therefore their acquisition must await relevant conceptual development. According to a different, perhaps complementary, proposal, a major contributor to the difficulty of these items lies with the informational requirements for identifying them from the contexts in which they appear. The experiments reported here explore the implications of these proposals by investigating the contribution of observational and linguistic cues to the acquisition of mental predicate vocabulary. We first demonstrate that particular observed situations can be helpful in prompting reference to mental contents, specifically, contexts that include a salient and/or unusual mental state such as a false belief. We then compare the potency of such observational support to the reliability of alternate or concomitant syntactic information (e.g., sentential complementation) in tasks where both children and adults are asked to hypothesize the meaning of novel verbs. The findings support the efficacy of false belief situations for increasing the saliency of mental state descriptions, but also show that syntactic information is a more reliable indicator of mentalistic interpretations than even the most cooperative contextual cues. Moreover, when syntactic and observational information sources converge, both children and simulated adult learners are vastly more likely to build conjectures involving mental verbs. This is consistent with a multiple-cue constraint satisfaction view of vocabulary acquisition. Taken together, our findings support the position that the informational demands of mapping, rather than age-related cognitive deficiency, can bear much of the explanatory burden for the learning problems posed by abstract words. Keywordstheory of mind; mental verbs; verb learning; syntactic bootstrapping; language acquisition --many of our complex ideas never had impressions that corresponded to them, and ...many of our complex impressions never are exactly copied in ideas.

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Section: Summary and Discussion Of The Findingssupporting

confidence: 70%

Section: A Proposal For How Mental Verbs Are Acquiredmentioning

confidence: 85%

Section: A Proposal For How Mental Verbs Are Acquiredmentioning

confidence: 99%

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When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs

2007

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“…More generally, a large body of research highlights the complexities involved in acquiring verb semantics at any developmental stage -specifically, the difficulty in extracting verb meanings from purely environmental contingencies (Gleitman, 1990;Gleitman, Cassidy, Nappa, Papafragou, & Trueswell, 2005;Gillette, Gleitman, Gleitman, & Lederer, 1999;Snedeker, 2000). In fact, Gleitman and colleagues have argued that the problem is so hard as to be intractable for many verbs.…”

Section: The Semantics Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition, the syntactic bootstrapping literature provides a further motivation for the current work. Gleitman and colleagues have claimed that "the set of frames associated with single verbs provides convergent evidence as to their full expressive range" (Gleitman et al, 2005; see also Fisher et al, 1991). Thus an important component of that theory is that learners are able to acquire verb-structure co-occurrences independent of verb meaning.…”

Section: The Semantics Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acquiring and processing verb argument structure: Distributional learning in a miniature language

Wonnacott

Newport

Tanenhaus

2008

Cognitive Psychology

193

218

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Adult knowledge of a language involves correctly balancing lexically-based and more languagegeneral patterns. For example, verb-argument structures may sometimes readily generalize to new verbs, yet with particular verbs may resist generalization. From the perspective of acquisition, this creates significant learnability problems (Baker 1979), with some researchers claiming a crucial role for verb semantics in the determination of when generalization may and may not occur (Pinker, 1989). Similarly, there has been debate regarding how verb-specific and more generalized constraints interact in sentence processing (Trueswell et al 1993;Mitchell 1987) and on the role of semantics in this process (Hare et al 2003). The current work explores these issues using artificial language learning. In three experiments using languages without semantic cues to verb distribution, we demonstrate that learners can acquire both verb-specific and verb-general patterns, based on distributional information in the linguistic input regarding each of the verbs as well as across the language as a whole. As with natural languages, these factors are shown to affect production, judgments and real-time processing. We demonstrate that learners apply a rational procedure in determining their usage of these different input-statistics and conclude by suggesting that a Bayesian perspective on statistical learning may be an appropriate framework for capturing our findings.

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Early World Learning

Waxman

Lidz

2007

Handbook of Child Psychology

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Hard Words

Cited by 434 publications

References 84 publications

When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs

When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs

Acquiring and processing verb argument structure: Distributional learning in a miniature language

Early World Learning

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