Linking language and events: Spatiotemporal cues drive children's expectations about the meanings of novel transitive verbs

Abstract

How do children map linguistic representations onto the conceptual structures that they encode? In the present studies, we provided 3-4 year old children with minimal-pair scene contrasts in order to determine the effect of particular event properties on novel verblearning. Specifically, we tested whether spatiotemporal cues to causation also inform children's interpretation of transitive verbs either with or without the causal/inchoative alternation (She broke the lamp/the lamp broke). In Experiment 1, we examined spatiotemporal continuity. Children saw scenes with puppets that approached a toy in a distinctive manner, and toys that lit up or played a sound. In the causal events, the puppet contacted the object, and activation was immediate. In the noncausal events, the puppet stopped short before reaching the object, and the effect occurred after a short pause (apparently spontaneously). Children expected novel verbs used in the inchoative transitive/intransitive alternation to refer to spatiotemporally intact causal interactions rather than to 'gap' control scenes. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the temporal order of sub-events, holding spatial relationships constant, and provided evidence for only one verb frame (either transitive or intransitive). Children mapped transitive verbs to scenes where the agent's action closely preceded the activation of the toy over scenes in which the timing of the two events was switched, but did not do so when they heard an intransitive construction. These studies reveal that children's expectations about transitive verbs are at least partly driven by their nonlinguistic understanding of causal events: children expect transitive syntax to refer to scenes where the agent's action is a plausible cause of the outcome. These findings open a wide avenue for exploration into the relationship between children's linguistic knowledge and their nonlinguistic understanding of events. During their first years of life, children develop rich and robust cognitive models of the world around them. They represent the differences between people and objects, make predictions about physical and social events, and learn complex patterns of causal information ( Baker, Saxe, & Tenenbaum, 2011;Luo, Kaufman, & Baillargeon, 2009;Sobel, Tenenbaum, & Gopnik, 2004;Spelke, 1990;Woodward, 1998). At the same time, they learn the structure and content of at least one language, acquiring representations that allow them to understand the speech around them and produce novel sentences of their own. LINKING LANGUAGE AND EVENTSRelatively little is known about how children map these linguistic representations onto the conceptual structures that they encode.A central property of human language is that there are systematic correspondences between the form of sentence (syntax) and its meaning (semantics) (Baker, 1988;Brown, 1958;Fillmore, 1968;Montague, 1970;Pinker, 1984). For instance, although there are no familiar content words in the sentence The blicket daxed the wug to the blorg, adults can infer that t...

Influence of causal language on causal understanding: A comparison between Swiss-German and Turkish

“…The findings also extend the literature regarding the causal form-meaning mapping (e.g., Arunachalam & Waxman, 2010;Kline et al, 2017;Naigles, 1990): Children not only infer a causal meaning from these linguistic cues but also use these cues to modify their initial non-causal event representations to include potential causal links between events.…”

“…Children have been shown to make use of this cue starting from the second year of life (e.g., Arunachalam & Waxman, 2010;Fisher, 2002;Göksun et al, 2008;Kline et al, 2017;Lidz et al, 2003;Naigles, 1990). For example, 2-year-olds choose a scene where a bunny pushes down a duck when they hear a pseudo-verb embedded in a transitive frame ("The bunny is gorping the duck") rather than a scene where they both wave one of their arms parallel to one another (Naigles, 1990).…”

“…With regard to the first question, there is ample evidence showing that children make use of the syntactic frame of sentences, as one structural cue, to derive causal meanings in several languages (e.g., Arunachalam & Waxman, 2010;Fisher, 2002;Göksun et al, 2008;Kline et al, 2017;Lee & Naigles, 2008;Lidz et al, 2003;Naigles, 1990). A recent study showed that 3-and 4-year-old children also make use of the morphological markers of causality to map onto causal events.…”

“…Turkish-speaking children consistently mapped sentences involving a causative marker attached to a pseudo-verb, onto causal events . In studies that use a forced-choice design, where children choose one event from two alternatives upon hearing a sentence with structural cues of causality, the two alternatives are a typical causal and a non-causal event (e.g., Arunachalam & Waxman, 2010;Fisher, 2002;Kline et al, 2017;Naigles, 1990). In principle, children should already perceive these events as causal and non-causal and choose the one fitting best with the sentence they hear.…”

Semantic detail in the developing verb lexicon: An extension of Naigles and Kako (1993)

“…If, on the other hand, the causal component is what is crucial, we would predict that toddlers would fail to map transitive verbs heard in dialogues to events in which one event participant performed an action, and another changed state, but there was no evident causal relation between them, for example, no spatial and/or temporal contiguity. Work by Bunger and Lidz (2006) and Kline, Snedeker, and Schulz (2017) indicates that toddlers do expect transitive sentences to describe events with spatiotemporal contiguity between the process and result subcomponents, but in neither study was a non-contiguous event pitted against a truly incompatible event such as the synchronous events used in the current study; in both cases non-contiguous and contiguous (canonically causative) events were pitted against each other at test. Thus, an interesting follow-up of these studies would be to see whether the spatiotemporal contiguity is a critical component of the toddler's representation, or simply a preferred interpretation when available.…”