The role of input frequency and semantic transparency in the acquisition of verb meaning: evidence from placement verbs in Tamil and Dutch.
We investigate how Tamil- and Dutch-speaking adults and four- to five-year-old children use caused posture verbs ('lay/stand a bottle on a table') to label placement events in which objects are oriented vertically or horizontally. Tamil caused posture verbs consist of morphemes that individually label the causal and result subevents (nikka veyyii 'make stand'; paDka veyyii 'make lie'), occurring in situational and discourse contexts where object orientation is at issue. Dutch caused posture verbs are less semantically transparent: they are monomorphemic (zetten 'set/stand'; leggen 'lay'), often occurring in contexts where factors other than object orientation determine use. Caused posture verbs occur rarely in Tamil input corpora; in Dutch input, they are used frequently. Elicited production data reveal that Tamil four-year-olds use infrequent placement verbs appropriately whereas Dutch children use high-frequency placement verbs inappropriately even at age five. Semantic transparency exerts a stronger influence than input frequency in constraining children's verb meaning acquisition.
Narasimhan
Bhuvana
B
University of Colorado at Boulder.
Gullberg
Marianne
M
Radboud University Nijmegen and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D032882:Comprehension; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D009426:Netherlands; D010700:Phonetics; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics; D014706:Verbal Learning