The Library
Mistakes weren't made : three-year-olds’ comprehension of novel-verb passives provides evidence for early abstract syntax
Tools
Messenger, Katherine and Fisher, Cynthia (2018) Mistakes weren't made : three-year-olds’ comprehension of novel-verb passives provides evidence for early abstract syntax. Cognition, 178 . pp. 118-132. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2018.05.002 ISSN 1873-7838.
|
PDF
WRAP-mistakes-three-year-olds-novel-verb-syntax-Messenger-2018.pdf - Accepted Version - Requires a PDF viewer. Download (1919Kb) | Preview |
Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.05.002
Abstract
By about age three, English-learning children begin to understand passive sentences with familiar verbs. We probed the nature of children’s linguistic representations by asking whether 3-year-olds promptly extend their emerging knowledge of the passive structure to novel verbs. In three preferential-looking experiments, 3-year-olds (N=124) interpreted novel verbs presented in short passives (Experiment 1, “She’s getting snedded!”) as transitive verbs, referring to causal-action rather than solo-action events, and used word-order in full passives, (Experiments 2 and 3, e.g., “She’s getting snedded by the boy!”), to select a target event in which the subject was the patient, not the agent of action. Comprehension accuracy in Experiments 1 and 2 varied with vocabulary, but this vocabulary effect disappeared when children were given more time and more repetitions of the test sentences (Experiment 3). These findings support early-abstraction accounts of acquisition: 3-year-olds represent passive syntax in abstract terms, permitting extension to novel verbs. This, in turn, allows them to use passive sentences to identify the grammatical subcategory and meaning of an unknown verb.
Item Type: | Journal Article | |||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics |
|||||||||
Divisions: | Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine > Science > Psychology | |||||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Child psychology, Children -- Language, Grammar, Comparative and general -- Syntax, Grammar, Comparative and general -- Verb | |||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Cognition | |||||||||
Publisher: | Elsevier | |||||||||
ISSN: | 1873-7838 | |||||||||
Official Date: | October 2018 | |||||||||
Dates: |
|
|||||||||
Volume: | 178 | |||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 118-132 | |||||||||
DOI: | 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.05.002 | |||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | |||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | |||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | |||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 11 June 2018 | |||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 28 May 2019 | |||||||||
RIOXX Funder/Project Grant: |
|
|||||||||
Related URLs: |
Request changes or add full text files to a record
Repository staff actions (login required)
View Item |
Downloads
Downloads per month over past year