Testing the role of semantic similarity in syntactic development

Area of Science:

• Developmental linguistics
• Child language acquisition

Background:

• Early syntactic development involves learning multiword constructions.
• Children may use semantic similarity to generalize learning beyond individual items.

Purpose of the Study:

• To test if semantic similarity facilitates early syntactic development in Hebrew-speaking children.
• To investigate the role of semantic similarity in the learning of verb-object (VO) constructions.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of longitudinal naturalistic speech corpora from 20 Hebrew-speaking children (aged 1;06-2;06).
• Examination of the first six types of VO constructions for learning facilitation and semantic similarity of direct objects (DOs).
• Categorization of DO semantic roles using an 8-category system.

Main Results:

• Evidence of learning facilitation (accelerated growth curves) in the first six VO construction types was observed.
• The first six DO types represented an average of 3.95 different semantic roles.
• On average, after learning the first VO construction, 3 out of the next 5 constructions did not have a DO from the same semantic category.

Conclusions:

• Facilitation in early syntactic learning, specifically for VO constructions, is likely not mediated by semantic similarity.
• Findings suggest alternative mechanisms may drive the generalization of early grammatical knowledge in children.