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

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00138

	Lexical Disambiguation in Verb Learning: Evidence from the Conjoined-Subject Intransitive Frame in English and Mandarin Chinese
	Arunachalam, Sudha 1; Syrett, Kristen 2; Chen, YongXiang3,4
摘要	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 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 dou (roughly, the distributive quantifier "each"). Our results point to a valuable source of information young children learning verbs: modifiers with familiar semantics.
关键词	lexical semantics verb learning syntactic bootstrapping adverbs modification distributivity Mandarin Chinese conjoined-subject intransitive
	2016-02-16
语种	英语
DOI	10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00138
发表期刊	FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
ISSN	1664-1078
卷号	7 期号:0 页码:1-14
期刊论文类型	Article
收录类别	SSCI
WOS关键词	EARLY SENTENCE COMPREHENSION ; ARGUMENT STRUCTURE ; WORD-ORDER ; CHILDREN ; NOUNS ; VOCABULARY ; ACQUISITION ; ADJECTIVES ; MEANINGS ; SPEAKING
WOS标题词	Social Sciences
WOS研究方向	Psychology
WOS类目	Psychology, Multidisciplinary
WOS记录号	WOS:000370127700001
资助机构	NIH(K01DC013306) ; Rutgers Startup grant ; Aresty Research Center at Rutgers-New Brunswick ; Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS) at Rutgers ; State University of New Jersey New Brunswick ; Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing by the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences(KJZD-LW-L04) ; Chinese Institute of Psychology
引用统计	被引频次：14[WOS] [WOS记录] [WOS相关记录]
文献类型	期刊论文
条目标识符	http://ir.psych.ac.cn/handle/311026/19573
专题	中国科学院行为科学重点实验室
作者单位	1.Boston Univ, Dept Speech Language & Hearing Sci, Boston, MA 02215 USA 2.Rutgers State Univ, Dept Linguist, New Brunswick, NJ 08903 USA 3.Shanxi Univ, Sch Educ Sci, Taiyuan 030006, Peoples R China 4.Chinese Acad Sci, Inst Psychol, Key Lab Behav Sci, Beijing 100101, Peoples R China
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Arunachalam, Sudha,Syrett, Kristen,Chen, YongXiang. Lexical Disambiguation in Verb Learning: Evidence from the Conjoined-Subject Intransitive Frame in English and Mandarin Chinese[J]. FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY,2016,7(0):1-14.
APA	Arunachalam, Sudha,Syrett, Kristen,&Chen, YongXiang.(2016).Lexical Disambiguation in Verb Learning: Evidence from the Conjoined-Subject Intransitive Frame in English and Mandarin Chinese.FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY,7(0),1-14.
MLA	Arunachalam, Sudha,et al."Lexical Disambiguation in Verb Learning: Evidence from the Conjoined-Subject Intransitive Frame in English and Mandarin Chinese".FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY 7.0(2016):1-14.

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