Social factors in the acquisition of a new word order

Chang, Franklin; Kobayashi, Tessei; Amano, Sadao

doi:10.1177/0142723709105316

Cited by 11 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…While adults in the Wonnacott et al (2008) study were willing to treat the artificial language learning context as providing pragmatic motivation for assigning a familiar meaning to one or more novel forms (cf. also Chang et al 2009), in the current work we avoided potential complications posed by synonymous constructions by assigning a novel function to our novel form. In this case, it is clear that the target "correct" response is one that makes use of the novel word order.…”

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confidence: 99%

Input effects on the acquisition of a novel phrasal construction in 5year olds

Wonnacott

Boyd

Thomson

et al. 2012

Journal of Memory and Language

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The present experiments demonstrate that children as young as five years old (M = 5;2) generalize beyond their input on the basis of minimal exposure to a novel argument structure construction. The novel construction that was used involved a non-English phrasal pattern: VN 1 N 2 , paired with a novel abstract meaning: N 2 approaches N 1 . At the same time, we find that children are keenly sensitive to the input: they show knowledge of the construction after a single day of exposure but this grows stronger after three days; also, children generalize more readily to new verbs when the input contains more than one verb. Keywords:verb argument structures; artificial language learning; novel construction learning; statistical learning Running head: NOVEL CONSTRUCTION LEARNING IN FIVE-YEAR-OLDS 3A characteristic property of natural languages is the systematic correlation between structural patterns and abstract semantic or information structure functions (Fillmore, 1968;Pinker, 1989;Landau & Gleitman, 1985;Grimshaw, 1990). Such correspondences in the domain of argument structure-encapsulated by the notion of argument structure constructions-provide the basic clause types of a language (Goldberg, 1995). For example, the English sentences Katie gave Jack the book and Poppy baked Henry a cake are both instances of the ditransitive construction-a common phrasal pattern involving a subject and two objects. The two sentences contain distinct words but both convey actual or intended transfer. Our knowledge of this abstract linking is evident in the fact that we can use the construction productively-i.e., it can be used with new lexical items that may or may not lexically encode the transfer meaning. For example, if asked what She mooped him something means, speakers are quite likely to guess that she gave him something (Ahrens, 1995;Goldberg, 1995). In fact, adults generally interpret utterances with novel verbs by attending to the semantics of the argument structure constructions involved (Kaschak & Glenberg, 2000;Goldwater & Markman, 2009;Kako 2006; Johnson & Goldberg, submitted a).At the same time, there is a question about whether young children are able to use argument structure constructions in the same way as adults. There is a great deal of evidence that children's early productions tend to avoid straying too far from their input. For example, when children younger than three hear a novel verb used intransitively, they are highly unlikely to productively transitivize it (Akhtar & Tomasello, 1997;Baker, 1979;Bates & MacWhinney, 1987;Braine, 1976;Pinker, 1989;Tomasello, 2000). Such experimental data, along with data from spontaneous production (Bowerman, 1982;Tomasello, 1992;Lieven, Pine, & Baldwin, 1997;Ingram & Thompson, 1996), have led to the proposal that early grammars lack abstract argument structure representations and that apparent uses of a construction actually rely on verb-specific representations (so called verb-islands;Tomasello, 2000).Evidence from comprehension is somewhat more mixed. Experiment...

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confidence: 99%

Input effects on the acquisition of a novel phrasal construction in 5year olds

Wonnacott

Boyd

Thomson

et al. 2012

Journal of Memory and Language

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“…That is, even by the age of four (as per the 'older' age groups in the present study and Matthews et al, 2007), children speaking languages with more flexibility in their word order conventions have not yet fully internalised the relevant grammatical rules. In the case of Japanese, Chang et al (2009) used a robotic dog to train the sentences, and so older children could have interpreted that a playful version of Japanese was required in order to give successful instructions to the robotic dog. In addition, verbs are placed in the sentence-final position in Japanese.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In studies using Japanese children no frequency effects are shown, however age does appear to have some impact on WWO performance (e.g. Chang, Kobayashi and Amano., 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning to construct sentences in Spanish: a replication of the Weird Word Order technique

et al. 2019

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In the present study, children's early ability to organise words into sentences was investigated using the Weird Word Order procedure with Spanish-speaking children. Spanish is a language that allows for more flexibility in the positions of subjects and objects, with respect to verbs, than other previously studied languages (English, French, and Japanese). As in prior studies (Abbot-Smith et al., 2001; Chang et al., 2009; Franck et al., 2011; Matthews et al., 2005, 2007), we manipulated the relative frequency of verbs in training sessions with two age groups (three- and four-year-old children). Results supported earlier findings with regard to frequency: children produced atypical word orders significantly more often with infrequent verbs than with frequent verbs. The findings from the present study support probabilistic learning models which allow higher levels of flexibility and, in turn, oppose hypotheses that defend early access to advanced grammatical knowledge.

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“…Socio-pragmatic factors were indeed recently found to play a critical role in children's performance with novel word orders. Chang and colleagues (2009) found that 4;06-year-old Japanese children matched WWO more often when speaking to a robot (assumed to speak a WWO language) than when speaking to the experimenter (Chang, Kobayashi & Amano 2009). Interestingly, children aged 4;06 were shown to produce more WWO matches than children aged 3 when speaking to the robot with both new and familiar verbs.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%