Meaning from syntax: Evidence from 2-year-olds |
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| Authors: | Sudha Arunachalam Sandra R. Waxman |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, United Kingdom;2. Research School of Psychology, Australian National University, Australia;1. San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182, USA;2. University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA;3. University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA;4. University of Geneva, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland;5. Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec H3G 1M8, Canada;1. International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Language, Cognition and Development Laboratory, Trieste, Italy;2. Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (EHESS-ENS-CNRS), Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University, Paris, France;3. INSERM, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, F91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France;4. CEA, NeuroSpin Center, IFR 49, F91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France;5. Université Paris XI, F91405 Orsay, France;6. Department of Psychology, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, United States;7. AP-HP, Université Paris Descartes, Maternité Port-Royal, Paris, France;1. Human–Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA;2. Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA;3. Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA;4. Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA |
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| Abstract: | When toddlers view an event while hearing a novel verb, the verb’s syntactic context has been shown to help them identify its meaning. The current work takes this finding one step further to reveal that even in the absence of an accompanying event, syntactic information supports toddlers’ identification of verb meaning. Two-year-olds were first introduced to dialogues incorporating novel verbs either in transitive or intransitive sentences, but in the absence of any relevant referent scenes (see Yuan & Fisher, 2009). Next, toddlers viewed two candidate scenes: (a) two participants performing synchronous actions, (b) two participants performing a causative action. When asked to “find mooping”, toddlers who had heard transitive sentences chose the causative scene; those who had heard intransitive sentences did not. These results demonstrate that 2-year-olds infer important components of meaning from syntactic structure alone, using it to direct their subsequent search for a referent in a visual scene. |
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