Academic Paper |
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| Title: | The role of input frequency and semantic transparency in the acquisition of verb meaning: evidence from placement verbs in Tamil and Dutch |
| Author: | Bhuvana Narasimhan |
| Institution: | University of Colorado at Boulder |
| Author: | Marianne Gullberg |
| Institution: | Lund University |
| Linguistic Field: | Applied Linguistics; Language Acquisition |
| Subject Language: |
Dutch
Tamil |
| Abstract: | We investigate how Tamil- and Dutch-speaking adults and four- to five-year-old children use caused posture verbs (‘lay/stand a bottle on a table’) to label placement events in which objects are oriented vertically or horizontally. Tamil caused posture verbs consist of morphemes that individually label the causal and result subevents (‘nikka veyyii’ ‘make stand’; ‘paDka veyyii’ ‘make lie’), occurring in situational and discourse contexts where object orientation is at issue. Dutch caused posture verbs are less semantically transparent: they are monomorphemic (‘zetten’ ‘set/stand’; ‘leggen’ ‘lay’), often occurring in contexts where factors other than object orientation determine use. Caused posture verbs occur rarely in Tamil input corpora; in Dutch input, they are used frequently. Elicited production data reveal that Tamil four-year-olds use infrequent placement verbs appropriately whereas Dutch children use high-frequency placement verbs inappropriately even at age five. Semantic transparency exerts a stronger influence than input frequency in constraining children's verb meaning acquisition. |
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This article appears in Journal of Child Language Vol. 38, Issue 3, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST . |
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