Meaning from syntax: Evidence from 2-year-olds. Arunachalam, S. & Waxman, S. R. Cognition, 114(3):442 - 446, 2010. doi abstract bibtex When toddlers view an event while hearing a novel verb, the verb's syntactic context has been shown to help them identify its meaning. The current work takes this finding one step further to reveal that even in the absence of an accompanying event, syntactic information supports toddlers' identification of verb meaning. Two-year-olds were first introduced to dialogues incorporating novel verbs either in transitive or intransitive sentences, but in the absence of any relevant referent scenes (see Yuan & Fisher, 2009). Next, toddlers viewed two candidate scenes: (a) two participants performing synchronous actions, (b) two participants performing a causative action. When asked to #find##mooping#, toddlers who had heard transitive sentences chose the causative scene; those who had heard intransitive sentences did not. These results demonstrate that 2-year-olds infer important components of meaning from syntactic structure alone, using it to direct their subsequent search for a referent in a visual scene.
@Article{Arunachalam2010,
author = {Sudha Arunachalam and Sandra R. Waxman},
journal = {Cognition},
title = {Meaning from syntax: Evidence from 2-year-olds},
year = {2010},
number = {3},
pages = {442 - 446},
volume = {114},
abstract = {When toddlers view an event while hearing a novel verb, the verb's
syntactic context has been shown to help them identify its meaning.
The current work takes this finding one step further to reveal that
even in the absence of an accompanying event, syntactic information
supports toddlers' identification of verb meaning. Two-year-olds
were first introduced to dialogues incorporating novel verbs either
in transitive or intransitive sentences, but in the absence of any
relevant referent scenes (see Yuan & Fisher, 2009). Next, toddlers
viewed two candidate scenes: (a) two participants performing synchronous
actions, (b) two participants performing a causative action. When
asked to #find##mooping#, toddlers who had heard transitive sentences
chose the causative scene; those who had heard intransitive sentences
did not. These results demonstrate that 2-year-olds infer important
components of meaning from syntactic structure alone, using it to
direct their subsequent search for a referent in a visual scene.},
doi = {10.1016/j.cognition.2009.10.015},
keywords = {Language acquisition},
}
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