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

Abstract

Verbs are often uttered before the events they describe. By 2 years of age, toddlers can learn from such an encounter. Hearing a novel verb in transitive sentences (e.g. The boy lorped the cat), even with no visual referent present, they later map it to a causative meaning (e.g. feed) (e.g. Yuan & Fisher, ). How much semantic detail does their verb representation include on this first, underinformative, encounter? Is the representation sparse, including only information for which they have evidence, or do toddlers make more specific guesses about the verb's meaning? In two experiments (N = 76, mean age 27 months), we address this using an event type studied by Naigles and Kako (); they found that when toddlers hear a novel transitive verb while simultaneously viewing a non-causative referent-a contact event such as patting-they map the verb to the contact event. In Experiment 1 we replicated this basic result. Further, toddlers' representations persisted over a 5-minute delay, manifesting again during a retest. In Experiment 2, toddlers heard the verbs while watching two actors converse instead of while seeing contact events. At test, they showed no evidence of mapping the verbs to contact events, either initially or after a 5-minute delay, despite that in prior work they mapped verbs to causative events under identical circumstances. We infer that on hearing a novel verb in a transitive frame, absent a relevant visual scene, toddlers posit a more specific representation than the evidence requires-one that incorporates causative semantics. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/aRCqSTbr6Bw.

The Developmental Origins of Syntactic Bootstrapping

“…The finding that toddlers systematically extended their knowledge of transitive word order to such events suggests that children may map word order onto a broad range of asymmetries in semantic roles. This pair of studies is part of a broader effort to determine what kinds of events young children readily construe as coherent two‐participant events, and what kinds of asymmetries in those participants’ roles children readily map onto word order in transitive sentences (e.g., Arunachalam & Dennis, ; Chestnut & Markman, ; Fisher & Song, ; Gleitman, Gleitman, Miller, & Ostrin, ; Kline, Snedeker, & Schultz, ; Landau & Gleitman, ; Naigles & Kako, ).…”

Quantifying the syntactic bootstrapping effect in verb learning: A meta‐analytic synthesis

“…For example, verbs denoting a causative event (e.g., pushing) tend to take two noun arguments (a "pusher" and a "pushee"), whereas verbs that denote self-generated motion (e.g., waving) take only one noun argument (a "waver"). A large body of work has demonstrated that children are able to successfully map a predicate with two noun arguments (a transitive predicate) to a two-agent causative event, and a predicate with one noun argument (an intransitive predicate) to a one-agent noncausative event (e.g., Arunachalam & Dennis, 2019;Gertner & Fisher, 2012;Messenger et al, 2015;Naigles, 1990;Yuan & Fisher, 2009).…”

Do focused interests support word learning? A study with autistic and nonautistic children

“…Following similar studies (e.g., Arunachalam & Dennis, 2019; Horvath et al, 2018), we planned to analyze children's eye gaze from 1 to 2.5 s of the Response phase, which was after children had heard the test query during the Query phase, and immediately at the offset of the second prompt to find the target during the Response phase. This window is appropriate because in similar studies it takes approximately 1 s for children to settle on a scene after a central fixation, and after approximately 2.5 s, children tend to shift gaze to the scene they had not previously been fixating.…”