Friday, June 17, 2005
Don’t Argue With This Article
Found this while stumbling through the archives of Language:
How Children Constrain Their Argument Structure Constructions
Patricia J. Brooks; Michael Tomasello
Language, Vol. 75, No. 4. (Dec., 1999), pp. 720-738.
Stable URLAbstract
We tested two hypotheses about how English-speaking children learn to avoid
making argument structure errors such as Don’t giggle me. The first is that
children base their usage of verbs on membership in narrow-range semantic
classes (Pinker 1989). The second is that children make use of indirect
negative evidence in the form of alternative expressions that preempt
tendencies to overgeneralize. Ninety-six children (32 each at 2.5, 4.5, and 6/7
years of age) were introduced to two nonce verbs, one as a transitive verb and
one as an intransitive verb. One verb was from a semantic class that can be
used both transitively and intransitively while the other was from a fixed
transitivity class. Half of the children were given preempting alternatives
with both verbs; for example, they heard a verb in a simple transitive
construction (as in Ernie’s meeking the car) and then they also heard it in a
passive construction-which enabled them to answer the question ‘What’s
happening with the car?’ with It’s getting meeked (rather than generalizing to
the intransitive construction with It’s meeking). We found empirical support
for the constraining role of verb classes and of preemption, but only for
children 4.5 years of age and older. Results are discussed in terms of a model
of syntactic development in which children begin with lexically specific
linguistic constructions and only gradually learn to differentiate verbs as
lexical items from argument structure constructions as abstract linguistic
entities.