Abstract
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 it") (Arunachalam & Waxman, 2010). We hypothesized that adverbs might facilitate toddlers' verb learning in these sparse pronominal frames if their semantic content directed toddlers' attention to aspects of the event that are relevant to the verb's meaning (e.g., the manner of motion). As predicted, the semantic information from a specific manner-of-motion adverb (slowly) supported verb learning, but other adverbs lacking this semantic content (nicely, right now) did not. These results provide the first evidence that adverbs can facilitate verb learning in toddlers and highlight the interaction of syntactic and semantic information in word learning.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 263-278 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | Language Learning and Development |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 2014 |
Funding
This research was supported by grants from the American Philosophical Society to the second author, and from the National Institutes of Health to the first (HD-057699) and third (HD-030410) authors. We are grateful to the toddlers and their caregivers who participated in this study, to Giordana Amato for CHILDES analyses, and to our undergraduate research assistants for their assistance in administering the experiments and coding the data. A subset of these data was presented at the 36th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, and a write-up of those data appears in that conference’s proceedings.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Education
- Language and Linguistics
- Linguistics and Language