Speaker:　Kristen Syrett
　　　　 　Department of Linguistics and Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS)
　　　　 　Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey – New Brunswick (USA)

Time:　　 10:00am - 11:30am
Date:　　 Jun 19th(wed), 2013
Venue:　 5th Floor Meeting Room, South Building IPCAS
Abstract: 
Acquiring the meaning of verbs poses unique challenges for the young language learner. How, then, can they succeed at learning new verbs? We know by now that the linguistic environment in which a verb appears plays an important role in enabling children to discern its meaning. In particular, the number and position of NPs occupying a verb’s syntactic frame reveal information about the syntax-semantics relationship encoded in the verb’s representation. By age two, children can map a novel verb in a transitive frame (e.g., Mary lorps Susie) to a causative event (e.g., one girl spinning another girl). But there are limits on how informative this information can be. For example, when pronouns flank the verb in place of substantive content nouns, two-year-olds have difficulty mapping novel verbs to their intended meaning. And despite the fact that the transitive frame signals a causative event, children do not consistently map a novel verb in a conjoined-subject intransitive frame (e.g., Mary and Susie lorp) to a scene with non-causative, synchronous subevents (e.g., a two girls waving simultaneously). It may be that the semantics associated with this syntactic frame are underspecified, and compatible with both scenes. In this talk, I will present evidence from a series of word learning tasks with two- to three-year-olds demonstrating that in both instances, certain adverbial modifiers may provide the requisite lexical semantic information complementing the syntactic environment permitting the child to home in on the intended event reference for the verb and map form to meaning.

In colloboration with Sudha Arunachalam (Boston University) and Sandra Waxman (Northwestern University).