Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Learning Verb Syntax via Listening: New Evidence From 22-Month-Olds
AU - Messenger, Katherine
AU - Yuan, Sylvia
AU - Fisher, Cynthia
PY - 2014/12/13
Y1 - 2014/12/13
N2 - Children recruit verb syntax to guide verb interpretation. We asked whether 22-month-olds spontaneously encode information about a particular novel verb’s syntactic properties through listening to sentences, retain this information in long-term memory over a filled delay, and retrieve it to guide interpretation upon hearing the same novel verb again. Children watched dialogues in which interlocutors discussed unseen events using a novel verb in transitive (e.g., “Anna blicked the baby”) or intransitive sentences (“Anna blicked”). Children later heard the verb in isolation (“Find blicking!”) while viewing a two-participant causal action and a one-participant action event. Children who had heard transitive dialogues looked longer at the two-participant event than did those who heard intransitive dialogues. This effect disappeared if children heard a different novel verb at test (“Find kradding!”). These findings implicate a role for distributional learning in early verb learning: syntactic-combinatorial information about otherwise unknown words may pervade the toddler’s lexicon, guiding later word interpretation.
AB - Children recruit verb syntax to guide verb interpretation. We asked whether 22-month-olds spontaneously encode information about a particular novel verb’s syntactic properties through listening to sentences, retain this information in long-term memory over a filled delay, and retrieve it to guide interpretation upon hearing the same novel verb again. Children watched dialogues in which interlocutors discussed unseen events using a novel verb in transitive (e.g., “Anna blicked the baby”) or intransitive sentences (“Anna blicked”). Children later heard the verb in isolation (“Find blicking!”) while viewing a two-participant causal action and a one-participant action event. Children who had heard transitive dialogues looked longer at the two-participant event than did those who heard intransitive dialogues. This effect disappeared if children heard a different novel verb at test (“Find kradding!”). These findings implicate a role for distributional learning in early verb learning: syntactic-combinatorial information about otherwise unknown words may pervade the toddler’s lexicon, guiding later word interpretation.
U2 - 10.1080/15475441.2014.978331
DO - 10.1080/15475441.2014.978331
M3 - Journal article
VL - 11
SP - 356
EP - 368
JO - Language Learning and Development
JF - Language Learning and Development
SN - 1547-5441
IS - 4
ER -