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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
Summary
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.
- 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.
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