TY - JOUR
T1 - 30-month-olds use the distribution and meaning of adverbs to interpret novel adjectives
AU - Syrett, Kristen
AU - Lidz, Jeffrey
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was made possible by funding from a Northwestern University Presidential Fellowship to the first author, a NSF grant BCS-0418309 and NIH grant DC006829 to the second author, and a NIH grant HD30410 for the Project on Child Development to Sandra Waxman. We are grateful to the parents and children who came to our laboratory to participate and to Rebecca Baier and Christy Call for their technical assistance and help in coordinating participants. This work benefited from many insightful discussions with Sandra Waxman, comments from members of the Northwestern Linguistics-Psychology Acquisition Lab (Joshua Viau, Ann Bunger, and Elisa Sneed German, in particular), and feedback from the audiences at the 2006 Midwest Semantics Workshop, a 2006 CNL lunch a the University of Maryland, the 2007 Boston University Conference on Language Development, the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, and the 2008 Language Acquisition Workshop at Princeton University. Finally, we thank two anonymous reviewers and Letitia Naigles, whose comments greatly improved the quality of our analysis and presentation.
PY - 2010/10
Y1 - 2010/10
N2 - Word learners are able to use the syntactic context of a word as one source of information to narrow down the space of possible meanings.We examine this bootstrapping process in the domain of adjectives, focusing on the acquisition of subcategories of Gradable Adjectives (GAs). We first show that robust patterns of adverbial modification in natural language sort GAs according to scalar structure: proportional modifiers (e.g., completely) tend to modify absolute maximum standard GAs (e.g., full), while intensifiers (e.g., very) tend to modify relative GAs (e.g., big).We then show in a word-learning experiment that 30-month-olds appear to be aware of such distributional differences and recruit them in word learning, assigning an interpretation to a novel adjective based on its modifier. We argue that children track both the range of adjectives modified by a given adverb and the range of adverbs modifying a given adjective, and use such surface-level information to classify new words according to possible pre-existing semantic representations.
AB - Word learners are able to use the syntactic context of a word as one source of information to narrow down the space of possible meanings.We examine this bootstrapping process in the domain of adjectives, focusing on the acquisition of subcategories of Gradable Adjectives (GAs). We first show that robust patterns of adverbial modification in natural language sort GAs according to scalar structure: proportional modifiers (e.g., completely) tend to modify absolute maximum standard GAs (e.g., full), while intensifiers (e.g., very) tend to modify relative GAs (e.g., big).We then show in a word-learning experiment that 30-month-olds appear to be aware of such distributional differences and recruit them in word learning, assigning an interpretation to a novel adjective based on its modifier. We argue that children track both the range of adjectives modified by a given adverb and the range of adverbs modifying a given adjective, and use such surface-level information to classify new words according to possible pre-existing semantic representations.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=79952881159&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=79952881159&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/15475440903507905
DO - 10.1080/15475440903507905
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:79952881159
SN - 1547-5441
VL - 6
SP - 258
EP - 282
JO - Language Learning and Development
JF - Language Learning and Development
IS - 4
ER -