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Related Experiment Videos

Does preemption help children learn verb transitivity?

Patricia J Brooks1, Otto Zizak

  • 1Department of Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work, 4S-223, College of Staten Island of the City University of New York, Staten Island, NY 10314, USA. pbrooks@postbox.csi.cuny.edu

Journal of Child Language
|December 11, 2002
PubMed
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Children learn verb transitivity through preemption, but only older children effectively use this indirect negative evidence to avoid nonconventional verb uses. This impacts understanding language acquisition.

Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Child Language Acquisition
  • Developmental Psychology

Background:

  • English verbs exhibit variable transitivity (e.g., break, roll).
  • Children must learn fixed transitivity for verbs like 'hit' (transitive) or 'fall' (intransitive).
  • The role of preemption in learning verb argument structure is not fully understood.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if preemption aids children in learning the fixed transitivity of novel verbs.
  • To determine how children learn to avoid nonconventional verb usage.
  • To examine age-related differences in using indirect negative evidence for verb acquisition.

Main Methods:

  • 48 four-year-olds and 48 six- to seven-year-olds participated.
  • Participants learned novel verbs modeled as either transitive or intransitive.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Exposure conditions manipulated preemptive evidence, including alternative constructions.

    • Main Results:

    • Older children (six- to seven-year-olds) exposed to preemption produced fewer transitivity violations.
    • Preemption via alternative constructions was particularly effective for older children.
    • Younger children showed limited ability to use indirect negative evidence.

    Conclusions:

    • Preemption, especially through alternative constructions, aids older children in acquiring verb transitivity.
    • Children's ability to utilize indirect negative evidence for verb argument structure is age-dependent.
    • This study highlights limitations in how children learn grammatical constraints on verb usage.