title: The input to verb learning in Mandarin Chinese: a role for syntactic bootstrapping.
abstract: The authors investigated the role of syntax in verb learning in Mandarin Chinese, which allows pervasive ellipsis of noun arguments. Two questions were investigated using the Beijing corpus on CHILDES: (a) Does the input to young children manifest syntactic-semantic correspondences as needed for acquiring verb meanings? (b) Are verbs presented in multiple frames? Over 6,000 child-directed utterances were parsed. Analyses revealed that transitive verbs, motion verbs, and internal/communication verbs were distinguished syntactically; moreover, the 60 target verbs were used in multiple sentence frames. These findings support a role for syntactic bootstrapping in Mandarin verb learning.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269-1020, USA. joanne.lee@uconn.edu
authors.forename: Joanne N
authors.initials: JN
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: Letitia R
authors.initials: LR
authors.lastname: Naigles
mesh_terms: D002675:Child, Preschool; D002681:China; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D014706:Verbal Learning; D014743:Videotape Recording