TY - JOUR
T1 - The Development of Causal Structure without a Language Model
AU - Rissman, Lilia
AU - Goldin-Meadow, Susan
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by NIH RO1 DC000491 to Susan Goldin-Meadow, as well as a postdoctoral diversity supplement to Lilia Rissman through this parent grant.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
PY - 2017/7/3
Y1 - 2017/7/3
N2 - Across a diverse range of languages, children proceed through similar stages in their production of causal language: their initial verbs lack internal causal structure, followed by a period during which they produce causative overgeneralizations, indicating knowledge of a productive causative rule. We asked in this study whether a child not exposed to structured linguistic input could create linguistic devices for encoding causation and, if so, whether the emergence of this causal language would follow a trajectory similar to the one observed for children learning language from linguistic input. We show that the child in our study did develop causation-encoding morphology, but only after initially using verbs that lacked internal causal structure. These results suggest that the ability to encode causation linguistically can emerge in the absence of a language model, and that exposure to linguistic input is not the only factor guiding children from one stage to the next in their production of causal language.
AB - Across a diverse range of languages, children proceed through similar stages in their production of causal language: their initial verbs lack internal causal structure, followed by a period during which they produce causative overgeneralizations, indicating knowledge of a productive causative rule. We asked in this study whether a child not exposed to structured linguistic input could create linguistic devices for encoding causation and, if so, whether the emergence of this causal language would follow a trajectory similar to the one observed for children learning language from linguistic input. We show that the child in our study did develop causation-encoding morphology, but only after initially using verbs that lacked internal causal structure. These results suggest that the ability to encode causation linguistically can emerge in the absence of a language model, and that exposure to linguistic input is not the only factor guiding children from one stage to the next in their production of causal language.
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U2 - 10.1080/15475441.2016.1254633
DO - 10.1080/15475441.2016.1254633
M3 - Article
C2 - 28983210
AN - SCOPUS:85008227630
VL - 13
SP - 286
EP - 299
JO - Language Learning and Development
JF - Language Learning and Development
SN - 1547-5441
IS - 3
ER -