Research on verb learning in early child development has demonstrated that children make use of perceptual evidence from the scene as well as syntactic information from the sentence for acquiring the meaning of verbs. Very young children who have limited knowledge of syntax can make only limited use of the syntactic information available. I propose that children start by using a basic syntactic cue - the number of nouns in the sentence. They interpret the nouns which they recognize in the sentence as arguments of the novel verb, and interpret the meaning of the novel verb as describing some relationship among those nouns. For example, in the sentence """"""""'The duck is blicking the bunny"""""""" the children would prefer to assign to the nonsense verb """"""""'blick"""""""" some relation between the duck and the bunny such as """"""""The duck is pushing the bunny."""""""" over some interpretation such as """"""""fall"""""""", given the appropriate perceptual evidence. Moreover, I suggest that the number of nouns in the sentence is the main constraint those young children use for verb learning. Thus, this predicts that those children will make errors in comprehension when they need to use more complex syntactic cues such as the order of words relative to the verb. For example, in the sentence """"""""'The duck and the bunny are blicking"""""""" the children might fail to detect the cues from the order of words and might still prefer to interpret """"""""'blick"""""""" as a relation such as """"""""push"""""""", rather than """"""""fall"""""""". Understanding the initial cues used for verb learning is a first step at understanding how children learn the meaning of verbs.
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