Reference states and reversals: undoing actions with verbs

Clark, Eve V.; Carpenter, Kathie; Deutsch, Werner

doi:10.1017/s0305000900009983

Cited by 33 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…The model succeeded in capturing the basic developmental stages for reversives reported by Bowerman (1982) and Clark, Carpenter, and Deutsch (1995). In particular, the model was able to produce overgeneralization errors such as "*unbreak" or "*disbend".…”

Section: The Organization Of Semantic Fieldsmentioning

confidence: 71%

Models of the Emergence of Language

MacWhinney

1998

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

167

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▪ Abstract Recent work in language acquisition has shown how linguistic form emerges from the operation of self-organizing systems. The emergentist framework emphasizes ways in which the formal structures of language emerge from the interaction of social patterns, patterns implicit in the input, and pressures arising from general aspects of the cognitive system. Emergentist models have been developed to study the acquisition of auditory and articulatory patterns during infancy and the ways in which the learning of the first words emerges from the linkage of auditory, articulatory, and conceptual systems. Neural network models have also been used to study the learning of inflectional markings and basic syntactic patterns. Using both neural network modeling and concepts from the study of dynamic systems, it is possible to analyze language learning as the integration of emergent dynamic systems.

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Section: The Organization Of Semantic Fieldsmentioning

confidence: 71%

Models of the Emergence of Language

MacWhinney

1998

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

167

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“…He found that English-speaking four-year-olds use a lexical strategy, which usually involves an antonym ('The ship is small'), as often as they use syntactic negation strategies ('The ship is not large'), whereas Japanese four-year-olds used the antonym strategy only 25% of the time. Clark, Carpenter & Deutsch (1995) examined how young children describe reversals of action. In one of their experiments, two-, three-and four-year-old English speakers gave commands to reverse an action that had been described using a nonce verb plus a 'positive' (up, on, in) or 'negative' (down, off, out) verb particle.…”

Section: Volume 28 Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

Antonyms in children's and child-directed speech

Murphy

Jones

2008

First Language

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This article presents two studies based on a corpus of American English speech by and to five children from 2 to 5 years old. The first study investigates frequency of antonym co-occurrence in speakers' turns. The second examines the discourse-functional properties of those co-occurrences, with comparison to adult-directed adult English. We find: (1) children know/use antonyms at earlier ages than experimental studies have shown; (2) children use antonyms for mostly the same discursive purposes as adults do; (3) children can be categorized as being either 'heavy' or 'light' antonym users, and 'heaviness' of antonym use seems to correlate to other aspects of antonym behaviour.

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“…The literature suggests that children are indeed able to use these to constrain verb meanings (e.g., Fisher, Hall, & Gleitman, 1994;Gleitman, 1990, for the evidence for the former source; Choi & Bowerman, 1991, for the latter). However, it is not clear how strongly these constraints are applied, or to what extent children rely on contextual and/or pragmatic information (Clark, 1997;Clark, Carpenter, & Deutsch, 1995;Tomasello, 1997), or to what extent fast-mapping is possible and successful for verbs. We would like to conclude by noting that we need to investigate lexical acquisition in a broad perspective, studying the acquisition of a wide range of lexical classes, including nouns, verbs, prepositions and classifiers, and to consider how different lexical structures influence patterns of word learning.…”

Section: Implications For the Theory Of Early Word Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Heuristics in learning classifiers: The acquisition of the classifier system and its implications for the nature of lexical acquisition

Uchida

Imai

1999

Jpn Psychol Res

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The research described in this paper examined how Japanese and Chinese children learn the classifier system. The acquisition of the classifier system is worthy of investigation because the nature of the classifier lexicon is very different from that of the noun lexicon, even though both nouns and classifiers deal with the classification of objects and other entities in the world. We believe that comparing the acquisition patterns of the two classes of words and identifying similarities and differences will give us important insights into the nature of lexical acquisition. Lexical nature of numerical classifiersNumerical classifiers are lexical items that are attached to a noun when quantity is specified. Their status is somewhat similar to quantifiers in English such as a piece of, a portion of. The important difference between English quantifiers and numerical classifiers is that English quantifiers are used for quantifying only mass nouns, while grammar demands that numerical classifiers be applied to all nouns when quantifying them. Thus, in quantifying, Abstract: Classifiers are like nouns in that they classify entities in the world into lexical categories. However, the lexical nature of the classifier system is very different from that of nouns. We discuss how Japanese and Chinese children learn the meanings of classifiers. We focus on two specific questions: How classifier acquisition is different from noun acquisition; and what the prerequisites are for spontaneously extracting the meanings of classifiers. It is shown that children are very conservative in assigning meaning to classifiers. The pace of learning largely depends on semantic complexity, across languages and within each language. Furthermore, we suspect that learning the meanings of classifiers requires a certain cognitive ability -an ability to synthesize pieces of partial knowledge and form them into a cohesive whole. It may be only when children have developed such an ability that they are able to extract the complex semantic rules of classifiers on their own. We conclude that children take very different routes in learning nouns and classifiers: Unlike noun acquisition, classifier acquisition is guided by a slow, bottom-up process.

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Reference states and reversals: undoing actions with verbs

Cited by 33 publications

References 14 publications

Models of the Emergence of Language

Models of the Emergence of Language

Antonyms in children's and child-directed speech

Heuristics in learning classifiers: The acquisition of the classifier system and its implications for the nature of lexical acquisition

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