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Ma, Weiyi; Luo, Rufan; Golinkoff, Roberta; Hirsh-Pasek, Kathy – Language Learning and Development, 2023
Verbs serve as the architectural centerpiece of sentences, making verb learning pivotal for language acquisition. Verb learning requires both the formation of a verb-action mapping and the abstraction of relations between an object and its action. Two competing positions have been proposed to explain the process of verb learning: (a) seeing a…
Descriptors: Verbs, Language Acquisition, English, Cognitive Mapping
Christodoulou, Christiana; Wexler, Kenneth – Language Learning and Development, 2023
This paper explores the nature of copula omission in Cypriot Greek individuals with Down Syndrome (DS). Previous studies on DS have attributed high rates of copula omission to an overall grammatical/inflectional impairment without offering further analysis. In order to identify relevant conditioning factors, we examined copula productions and…
Descriptors: Down Syndrome, Greek, Dialects, Foreign Countries
Horvath, Sabrina; Kueser, Justin B.; Kelly, Jaelyn; Borovsky, Arielle – Language Learning and Development, 2022
While semantic and syntactic properties of verb meaning can impact the success of verb learning at a single age, developmental changes in how these factors influence acquisition are largely unexplored. We ask whether the impact of syntactic and semantic properties on verb vocabulary development varies with age and language ability for toddlers…
Descriptors: Syntax, Semantics, Toddlers, Verbs
Davis, E. Emory; Landau, Barbara – Language Learning and Development, 2021
Perception verbs and mental verbs have significant overlap in their syntax and semantics; both reference mental representations when taking embedded clauses, as in "I see that Maria was here" and "I think that Maria was here." Some have suggested that perception is more accessible for young children than mental states, raising…
Descriptors: Verbs, Semantics, Phrase Structure, Perception
Lippeveld, Marie; Oshima-Takane, Yuriko – Language Learning and Development, 2020
The cross-categorical use of nouns and verbs poses a challenging problem to young language learners because they are known to be less willing to accept that a single form of a word be used for more than one linguistic purpose (e.g., one-form/one-function principle). The present study investigated whether children under 3 years of age are able to…
Descriptors: Nouns, Verbs, Language Acquisition, Semantics
Huang, Yi Ting; Bounds, Mary; Suzuki, Yuichi – Language Learning and Development, 2019
Children acquire argument structure through distributional evidence, but how does this interacts with event semantics and existing verb knowledge? The current study compares verb learning in adult speakers of Japanese (where lexical causatives span wider semantic categories) and English (where alternation is more restricted). In the Fully…
Descriptors: Verbs, Semantics, Language Acquisition, Japanese
Koring, Loes; Mak, Pim; Mulders, Iris; Reuland, Eric – Language Learning and Development, 2018
Previous studies have demonstrated that, for adults, differences between unaccusative verbs (e.g., "fall") and unergative verbs (e.g., "dance") lead to a difference in processing. However, so far we don't know whether this effect shows up in children's processing of these verbs as well. This study measures children's processing…
Descriptors: Language Processing, Verbs, Adults, Children
Suzuki, Takaaki; Kobayashi, Tessei – Language Learning and Development, 2017
Syntactic bootstrapping facilitates children's initial learning of verb meanings based on syntactic information. A challenging case is the argument-drop languages, where the number of argument NPs is not a reliable cue for distinguishing between transitive and intransitive verbs. Despite this fact, the availability of syntactic bootstrapping in…
Descriptors: Syntax, Cues, Grammar, Verbs
Kline, Melissa; Snedeker, Jesse; Schulz, Laura – Language Learning and Development, 2017
How do children map linguistic representations onto the conceptual structures that they encode? In the present studies, we provided 3-4-year-old children with minimal-pair scene contrasts in order to determine the effect of particular event properties on novel verb learning. Specifically, we tested whether spatiotemporal cues to causation also…
Descriptors: Cues, Children, Verbs, Spatial Ability
Semantic Ambiguity and Syntactic Bootstrapping: The Case of Conjoined-Subject Intransitive Sentences
Pozzan, Lucia; Gleitman, Lila R.; Trueswell, John C. – Language Learning and Development, 2016
When learning verb meanings, learners capitalize on universal linguistic correspondences between syntactic and semantic structure. For instance, upon hearing the transitive sentence "the boy is glorping the girl," 2-year-olds prefer a two-participant event (e.g., a boy making a girl spin) over two simultaneous one-participant events (a…
Descriptors: Semantics, Syntax, Ambiguity (Semantics), Linguistic Theory
Ozturk, Ozge; Papafragou, Anna – Language Learning and Development, 2016
Evidentiality in language marks how information contained in a sentence was acquired. For instance, Turkish has two past-tense morphemes that mark whether access to information was direct (typically, perception) or indirect (hearsay/inference). Full acquisition of evidential systems appears to be a late achievement cross-linguistically. Currently,…
Descriptors: Turkish, Information Sources, Language Processing, Hypothesis Testing
Ozturk, Ozge; Papafragou, Anna – Language Learning and Development, 2015
Three experiments investigated the acquisition of English epistemic modal verbs (e.g., "may", "have to"). Semantically, these verbs encode possibility or necessity with respect to available evidence. Pragmatically, the use of weak epistemic modals often gives rise to scalar conversational inferences (e.g., "The toy may be…
Descriptors: Epistemology, Pragmatics, Inferences, Semantics
Lakusta, Laura; Carey, Susan – Language Learning and Development, 2015
Across languages and event types (i.e., agentive and nonagentive motion, transfer, change of state, attach/detach), goal paths are privileged over source paths in the linguistic encoding of events. Furthermore, some linguistic analyses suggest that goal paths are more central than source paths in the semantic and syntactic structure of motion…
Descriptors: Infants, Motion, Goal Orientation, Semantics
Moscati, Vincenzo; Crain, Stephen – Language Learning and Development, 2014
Negative sentences with epistemic modals (e.g., John "might" not come/John "can" not come) contain two logical operators, negation and the modal, which yields a potential semantic ambiguity depending on scope assignment. The two possible readings are in a subset/superset relation, such that the strong reading ("can…
Descriptors: Morphemes, Epistemology, Semantics, Linguistic Theory
Syrett, Kristen; Arunachalam, Sudha; Waxman, Sandra R. – Language Learning and Development, 2014
To acquire the meanings of verbs, toddlers make use of the surrounding linguistic information. For example, 2-year-olds successfully acquire novel transitive verbs that appear in semantically rich frames containing content nouns ("The boy is gonna pilk a balloon"), but they have difficulty with pronominal frames ("He is gonna pilk…
Descriptors: Toddlers, Verbs, Semantics, Language Research