The input to verb learning in Mandarin Chinese: a role for syntactic bootstrapping |
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Authors: | Lee Joanne N Naigles Letitia R |
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Institution: | Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269-1020, USA. joanne.lee@uconn.edu |
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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. |
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