Can children use a verb without exposure to its argument structure?

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Language Acquisition
• Developmental Psychology

Background:

• Canonical sentence schemas, such as Agent-verb-Patient, may provide default argument structures for verbs during early language learning.
• This default assignment is particularly relevant when a verb's lexical entry initially lacks specific argument structure information.

Purpose of the Study:

• To test the hypothesis that canonical sentence schemas assign argument structure to verbs.
• To investigate the role of these schemas in causative verb errors and verb transitivity acquisition.
• To compare the usage of novel and familiar verbs by adults and children.

Main Methods:

• Novel action verbs were created, categorized as causative, intransitive, or unmarked for transitivity.
• Spontaneous verb usage was recorded, alongside responses to agent- and patient-focused questions.
• Data from novel verbs were compared with data from familiar English verbs of fixed and optional transitivity.

Main Results:

• Subjects readily used novel verbs both transitively and intransitively, with adults showing more adherence to assigned transitivity than children.
• Familiar verb transitivity was generally respected across age groups.
• Discourse pressure from specific question types significantly influenced observed verb transitivity.

Conclusions:

• The study found no evidence for an intransitive-to-causative derivational process as previously postulated.
• Causative verb errors are proposed to stem from argument structure assignment via canonical sentence schemas, especially when a specific argument (Agent or Patient) needs to be the sentence subject.
• This schema-based theory offers an alternative explanation for errors without requiring the unlearning of incorrect lexical entries and can be applied to other argument structure errors.