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Japanese two-year-olds use morphosyntax to learn novel verb meanings*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 September 2011

AYUMI MATSUO*
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
SOTARO KITA
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
YURI SHINYA
Affiliation:
Kure National College of Technology
GARY C. WOOD
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
LETITIA NAIGLES
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
*
Address for correspondence: e-mail: a.matsuo@sheffield.ac.uk

Abstract

Previous research has found that children who are acquiring argument-drop languages such as Turkish and Chinese make use of syntactic frames to extend familiar verb meanings (Göksun, Küntay & Naigles, 2008; Lee & Naigles, 2008). This article investigates whether two-year-olds learning Japanese, another argument-drop language, make use of argument number and case markings in learning novel verbs. Children watched videos of novel causative and non-causative actions via Intermodal Preferential Looking. The novel verbs were presented in transitive or intransitive frames; the NPs in the transitive frames appeared ‘bare’ or with case markers. Consistent with previous findings of Morphosyntactic Bootstrapping, children who heard the novel verbs in the transitive frame with case markers reliably assigned those verbs to the novel causative actions.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

[*]

We would like to thank all the nurseries and children who participated in the study. We benefited from useful discussions with Kerstin Abbot-Smith and Aylin Küntay. This study was funded by Economic and Social Research Council in the UK (RES-000-22-1398).

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