LINGUIST List 18.1791
Wed Jun 13 2007
Diss: Psycholing: Arunachalam: 'Early Verb Representations'
Editor for this issue: Hunter Lockwood
<hunterlinguistlist.org>
Directory
1. Sudha
Arunachalam,
Early Verb Representations
Message 1: Early Verb Representations
Date: 12-Jun-2007
From: Sudha Arunachalam <sarunachbabel.ling.upenn.edu>
Subject: Early Verb Representations
Institution: University of Pennsylvania
Program: Department of Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2007
Author: Sudha Arunachalam
Dissertation Title: Early Verb Representations
Linguistic Field(s):
Psycholinguistics
Dissertation Director:
David Embick
Lila Gleitman
John C. Trueswell
Dissertation Abstract:
This dissertation investigates the lexico-syntactic representations thatchildren form when learning new verbs. Three questions are addressed: 1)how do children integrate multiple sources of evidence from the environmentwhen determining the meanings and syntactic properties of novel verbs? 2)are representations formed in such a way that they can be immediatelydeployed by the online sentence comprehension system? and 3) can the way inwhich children learn verbs inform theoretical approaches to argumentstructure?
Young children exploit several cues from the environment to help them learnverbs, and they do so rapidly, immediately mapping new words onto eventcategories. I present three experiments demonstrating that 3-5 year-oldchildren use both the sentence a novel verb is presented in and theproperties of the event highlighted by a preceding event to form a new verbrepresentation. Children were presented with locative events, compounds ofa pour-type and a fill-type event, and were tested to see whether they had isolated the manner or result as encoded by the novel verb. When thelinguistic and event cues converged on the same interpretation, or whenthese cues were presented in isolation, children successfully picked outthe correct component. The linguistic representations these children formedwere also immediately accessible by the online parsing system, yieldinganticipatory eye movements to the expected direct object of the verb duringlistening. When the cues pointed to different interpretations, childrenwere at chance in choosing one, and showed no anticipatory eye movementbehavior. These results demonstrate that children construct new verbrepresentations by integrating multiple sources of evidence, and even oneexperience with a verb can yield a robust enough representation forimmediate access to the parsing machinery.
A review of theoretical approaches to argument structure concludes thatalthough the verb learning literature has been quite valuable in mappingout the evidential sources used by the learner and their developmental timecourse, verb learning studies like this one do not lend substantial supportto particular theoretical claims about how argument structure isrepresented in the grammar. Future work must attempt to close this gapbetween the disciplines.
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