The Input to Verb Learning in Mandarin Chinese: A Role for Syntactic Bootstrapping

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 acq...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Developmental psychology 2005-05, Vol.41 (3), p.529-540
Main Authors: Lee, Joanne N, Naigles, Letitia R
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biological and medical sciences
Bootstrap methods
Child development
Child Language
Child, Preschool
Children
China
Chinese
Chinese languages
Developmental psychology
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Humans
Language
Language Acquisition
Language Development
Linguistics
Male
Mandarin
Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin dialect
Meaning
Newborn. Infant
Nouns
Oral Language
Parent-Child communication
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Semantics
Speech
Syntax
Verbal Learning
Verbs
Videotape Recording
Young Children
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0012-1649
1939-0599
DOI:10.1037/0012-1649.41.3.529