Lexical Disambiguation in Verb Learning: Evidence from the Conjoined-Subject Intransitive Frame in English and Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

When presented with a novel verb in a transitive frame (X is Ving Y), young children typically select a causative event referent, rather than one in which agents engage in parallel, non-causative synchronous events. However, when presented with a conjoined-subject intransitive frame (X and Y are Ving), participants (even adults, as we show) are at chance. Although in some instances, children older than three can obtain above-chance-level performance, these experiments still appear to rely upon a within-experiment contrast with the transitive frame. This leads us to ask whether children can achieve success with the intransitive frame without such a contrast among constructions, and map a novel verb appearing in such a frame onto a non-causative meaning. Building on recent evidence that adverbial modifiers can support word learning for adjectives and for verbs (when both nominal and verbal candidate interpretations are considered) by directing children to a particular construal of a scene, we test the hypothesis that a semantically informative modifier, together, will provide children with additional lexical information that allows them to narrow down verb meaning and identify a non-causative interpretation for a novel verb appearing in the conjoined-subject intransitive frame. We find that for English-speaking children and adults it does, but only when together directly modifies the verb phrase, suggesting that participants appeal to compositionality and not just the brute addition of another word, even one that is semantically meaningful, to arrive at the intended interpretation. Children acquiring Mandarin Chinese, in contrast, do not succeed with the translation-equivalent of together (although adult speakers do), but they do with dōu (roughly, the distributive quantifier “each”). Our results point to a valuable source of information young children learning verbs: modifiers with familiar semantics.

Studying the Real-Time Interpretation of Novel Noun and Verb Meanings in Young Children

“…Thus, we decided to also test an older group of participants (i.e., children older than 3 years of age) for whom we expected this ability would be present. Although there is no evidence in the literature showing that 3-to-4-year-olds would be able to exploit function words in real-time to determine the syntactic category of novel words and infer their meanings, there is at least evidence that 3-to-5-year-olds can succeed in tasks where they needed to discover the meaning of novel verbs while watching dynamic scenes at the screen (e.g., Imai et al, 2008; Nappa et al, 2009; Arunachalam et al, 2016) and they also succeed to learn novel word meanings after have heard only three occurrences of a novel word in informative linguistic contexts (e.g., Imai et al, 2005, 2008).…”

“…Going further, several studies demonstrated that 2-year-olds can use syntax even more specifically, not only to identify that a novel word is a verb or a noun but also to infer what kind of event a given verb is referring to depending on the syntactic structure in which it appears. For instance, 2-year-olds interpret a novel verb such as “blicking” as referring specifically to a causal event between two participants when they listen to transitive sentences such as “She is blicking the baby,” but they do not build the same interpretation about that novel verb when they listen to intransitive sentences such as “She is blicking” (e.g., Yuan and Fisher, 2009; Arunachalam and Waxman, 2010; Scott and Fisher, 2012; Yuan et al, 2012; Dautriche et al, 2014; Messenger et al, 2015; Arunachalam et al, 2016; Suzuki and Kobayashi, 2017; Arunachalam and Dennis, 2018). Moreover, recent studies demonstrated that 19- and 24-month-olds exposed to sentences like “The vep is crying” inferred that “vep” referred to an animate entity (i.e., a novel animal), because it appeared in the subject position of a familiar verb that requires an animate agent; in contrast, participants who were exposed to sentences like “The vep is right here” showed no preference for an animate entity at test (Ferguson et al, 2014, 2018).…”

“…Previous studies conducted in English, French and Japanese demonstrated that the ability to exploit function words to determine the syntactic category of novel words can indeed help children around age two to constrain the meanings of novel words (e.g., Naigles, 1990, 1996; Waxman, 1999; Waxman and Booth, 2001; Bernal et al, 2007; Imai et al, 2008; Booth and Waxman, 2009; Yuan and Fisher, 2009; Arunachalam and Waxman, 2010, 2011, 2015; Oshima-Takane et al, 2011; Matsuo et al, 2012; Yuan et al, 2012; Dautriche et al, 2014, 2015; Messenger et al, 2015; Arunachalam et al, 2016; He and Lidz, 2017; Lidz et al, 2017; Arunachalam and Dennis, 2018; de Carvalho et al, 2019). However, in these studies, young children were first taught the meaning of a novel content word while listening to several repetitions of sentences, during a familiarization phase, and later were tested on their interpretation, during a test phase.…”

Acquisition of Verb Meaning From Syntactic Distribution in Preschoolers With Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…These two children's scores on the Social Communication Questionnaire (SCQ; Rutter, Bailey, & Lord, 2003) were both above the cutoff of 15 (21 and 23), indicating that they met criterion; however, the SCQ was designed 1 Although we generally think it is ideal to use within-subject manipulations with clinical populations to permit detailed analyses of individual differences, we adopt the standard between-subjects design for this paradigm because of concerns that exposure to one condition would affect performance in the other. See our discussion of the potential impact of this design choice in Arunachalam, Syrett, and Chen (2016).…”

“…We instead follow on numerous prior studies with typically developing children (beginning with Naigles, 1990), which used a between-subjects design and randomly assigned children to either a transitive condition or an intransitive condition (e.g., "The boy and the girl are mooping"). Because the intransitive sentence can refer to either a causative event or synchronous events (Arunachalam, Syrett, & Chen, 2016;Naigles & Kako, 1993), the intransitive condition serves as a control against which we compare performance in the transitive condition. 1 Shulman and Guberman (2007) included both transitive and intransitive conditions, but their study involved children who were quite a bit older (mean age = 5;7), and furthermore, they were acquiring Hebrew, whose syntactic properties differ from English in important ways, making comparison difficult.…”