The Input to Verb Learning in Mandarin Chinese: A Role for Syntactic Bootstrapping.

The authors investigated the role of syntax in verb learning in Mandarin Chinese, which allows pervasive ellipsis of noun arguments. Two questions were investigated using the Beijing corpus on CHILDES: (a) Does the input to young children manifest syntactic-semantic correspondences as needed for acquiring verb meanings? (b) Are verbs presented in multiple frames? Over 6,000 child-directed utterances were parsed. Analyses revealed that transitive verbs, motion verbs, and internal/communication verbs were distinguished syntactically; moreover, the 60 target verbs were used in multiple sentence frames. These findings support a role for syntactic bootstrapping in Mandarin verb learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verb-specific constraints in sentence processing: Separating effects of lexical preference from garden-paths.

Immediate effects of verb-specific syntactic (subcategorization) information were found in a cross-modal naming experiment, a self-paced reading experiment, and an experiment in which eye movements were monitored. In the reading studies, syntactic misanalysis effects in sentence complements (e.g., "The student forgot the solution was…") occurred at the verb in the complement (e.g., was) for matrix verbs typically used with noun phrase complements but not for verbs typically used with sentence complements. In addition, a complementizer effect for sentence-complement-biased verbs was not due to syntactic misanalysis but was correlated with how strongly a particular verb prefers to be followed by the complementizer that. The results support models that make immediate use of lexically specific constraints, especially constraint-based models, but are problematic for lexical filtering models. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Causative alternations of children with specific language impairment

Alternating verbs to indicate or to relinquish cause requires an understanding of semantic and syntactic knowledge. This study evaluated the ability of children with specific language impairment (SLI) to produce the causative alternation in comparison to age peers and to language peers. The children with SLI were proficient in lexically alternating verbs, yet provided fewer passive and periphrastic constructions and more different verbs and adjectival responses. Overgeneralization error data suggest that the semantic systems of some children with SLI were similar to their age comparisons. Individual differences within the SLI group suggested that some children were adept at providing syntactic responses and overgeneralizations, whereas some of the SLI group provided less mature responses of no alternations and no responses. These findings demonstrate a syntactic deficit in the causative alternation for some children with SLI.     

Linguistic determinism and the part of speech.

"Nouns used by young English-speaking children were more reliably the names of things and their verbs more reliably the names of actions than… the nouns and verbs used by English-speaking adults. It was shown experimentally that young English-speaking children take the part-of-speech membership of a new word as a clue to the meaning of the word. In this way, they make use of the semantic distinctiveness of the parts of speech… . Differences between languages in their parts of speech may be diagnostic of differences in the cognitive psychologies of those who use languages." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Uses of past forms in the social pretend play of Italian children

In different languages children have been found to use past verb forms to express the meaning of 'unreality' during social pretend play. In this study, the verb forms used by 14 four-year-old Italian children in their pretend play were investigated. Results show that different Italian past verb forms tend to co-occur with different play activities. The imperfect occurs mainly when children plan and negotiate their pretend activities and marks the transition from a real to a pretend frame of reference. The present perfect occurs mainly when children implement their plans and communicate within a pretend frame that has already been established. Results of this study are discussed in comparison with findings on the pretend language of children speaking other languages.     

Nouns are not always learned before verbs: Evidence from Mandarin speakers' early vocabularies.

This article examines D. Gentner's (1982) claim that nouns are universally predominant in children's early vocabularies. When a conservative method of counting nouns was used, 9 out of 10 22-month-old monolingual Mandarin-speaking children produced more verbs or action words than nouns or object labels in their naturalistic speech. When a more liberal definition of nouns was used, neither a noun nor a verb bias was found. Importantly, there was no difference in the type-token ratios of the children's use of nouns and verbs. Thus, a sampling bias type of explanation cannot explain the prevalence of verbs in these data. Instead, these data suggest the importance of a variety of linguistic and sociocultural input factors in early word learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Excitotoxic lesions centered on perirhinal cortex produce delay-dependent deficits in a test of spatial memory

The purpose of the study was to assess developments in the theory of mind suggested by changes in the organization of cognitive verb extensions during the elementary school years. Adults and 3rd- and 5th-grade children were provided with a set of mental activity scenarios and were asked to select the best verbs from a list of cognitive verbs that might apply to each scenario. Changes in organization were assessed by examining overlapping uses of cognitive verbs in different contexts. There were 3 major changes with development: (a) the understanding of the role of memory in input functions increased, (b) the interrelatedness of memory- and comprehension-related verbs increased, and (c) the importance of cognitive certainty and uncertainty engaged by constructive processing verbs increased. Together, these findings suggest that a constructivist theory of mind develops in later childhood.     

Young children can extend motion verbs to point-light displays.

In the first study using point-light displays (lights corresponding to the joints of the human body) to examine children's understanding of verbs, 3-year-olds were tested to see if they could perceive familiar actions that corresponded to motion verbs (e.g., walking). Experiment 1 showed that children could extend familiar motion verbs (e.g., walking and dancing) to videotaped point-light actions shown in the intermodal preferential looking paradigm. Children watched the action that matched the requested verb significantly more than they watched the action that did not match the verb. In Experiment 2, the findings of Experiment 1 were validated by having children spontaneously produce verbs for these actions. The use of point-light displays may illuminate the factors that contribute to verb learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's productivity with word order and verb morphology.

Four studies examined English-speaking children's productivity with word order and verb morphology. Two- and 3-year-olds were taught novel transitive verbs with experimentally controlled argument structures. The younger children neither used nor comprehended word order with these verbs; older children comprehended and used word order correctly to mark agents and patients of the novel verbs. Children as young as 2 years 1 month added -ing but not -ed to verb stems; older children were productive with both inflections. These studies demonstrate that the present progressive inflection is used productively before the regular past tense marker and suggest that productivity with word order may be independent of developments in verb morphology. The findings are discussed in terms of M. Tomasello's (1992a) Verb Island hypothesis and M. Rispoli's (1991) notion of the mosaic acquisition of grammatical relations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Caregiver speech and children's use of nouns versus verbs: a comparison of English, Italian, and Mandarin

This paper examines naturalistic samples of adult-to-child speech to determine if variations in the input are consistent with reported variations in the proportions of nouns and verbs in children's early vocabularies. It contrasts two PRO-DROP languages, Italian and Mandarin, with English. Naturalistic speech samples from six 2:0 English-, six 1:11 Italian-, and ten 1:10 Mandarin-speaking children and their caregivers were examined. Adult-to-child speech was coded for the type frequency, token frequency, utterance position, and morphological variation of nouns and verbs as well as the types and placements of syntactic subjects and the pragmatic focus of adult questions. Children's spontaneous productions of nouns and verbs and their responses to adult questions were also examined. The results suggest a pattern consistent with the children's spontaneous production data. Namely, the speech of English-speaking caregivers emphasized nouns over verbs, whereas that of Mandarin-speaking caregivers emphasized verbs over nouns. The data from the Italian-speaking caregivers were more equivocal, though still noun-oriented, across these various input measures.     

Verb retrieval and sentence production in aphasia

This paper presents a subject with a selective verb retrieval deficit. Nouns were produced more successfully than verbs in spontaneous speech, picture naming and when naming to definition. The word class effect was not observed in comprehension tasks, reading aloud or writing. This indicated that it was due to a specific problem in accessing verbs' phonological representations from semantics. The second part of the paper explores the implications of the verb deficit for sentence production. Analyses of narrative speech revealed a typically agrammatic profile, with minimal verb argument structure and few function words and inflections. Two investigations suggested that the sentence deficit was at least partly contingent upon the verb deficit. In the first, the subject was asked to produce a sentence with the aid of a provided noun or verb. The noun cues were not effective in eliciting sentences, whereas verb cues were. The second investigation explored the effects of therapy aiming to improve verb retrieval. This therapy resulted in better verb retrieval and improved sentence production with those verbs. These findings suggest that an inability to access verbs' phonological representations can severely impair sentence formulation. Implications for models of sentence production are considered.     

Phonological typicality does not influence fixation durations in normal reading.

Using a word-by-word self-paced reading paradigm, T. A. Farmer, M. H. Christiansen, and P. Monaghan (2006) reported faster reading times for words that are phonologically typical for their syntactic category (i.e., noun or verb) than for words that are phonologically atypical. This result has been taken to suggest that language users are sensitive to subtle relationships between sound and syntactic function and that they make rapid use of this information in comprehension. The present article reports attempts to replicate this result using both eyetracking during normal reading (Experiment 1) and word-by-word self-paced reading (Experiment 2). No hint of a phonological typicality effect emerged on any reading-time measure in Experiment 1, nor did Experiment 2 replicate Farmer et al.’s finding from self-paced reading. Indeed, the differences between condition means were not consistently in the predicted direction, as phonologically atypical verbs were read more quickly than phonologically typical verbs, on most measures. Implications for research on visual word recognition are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Developing organization of mental verbs and theory of mind in middle childhood: Evidence from extensions.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 34(5) of Developmental Psychology (see record 2008-09591-001). In this article, Figures 2 and 4 were inadvertently switched. The figure appearing on page 519 is Figure 4, and the data pertain to third graders; the figure appearing on page 521 is Figure 2, and the data pertain to adults.] The purpose of the study was to assess developments in the theory of mind suggested by changes in the organization of cognitive verb extensions during the elementary school years. Adults and 3rd- and 5th-grade children were provided with a set of mental activity scenarios and were asked to select the best verbs from a list of cognitive verbs that might apply to each scenario. Changes in organization were assessed by examining overlapping uses of cognitive verbs in different contexts. There were 3 major changes with development: (a) the understanding of the role of memory in input functions increased, (b) the interrelatedness of memory- and comprehension-related verbs increased, and (c) the importance of cognitive certainty and uncertainty engaged by constructive processing verbs increased. Together, these findings suggest that a constructivist theory of mind develops in later childhood. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A metalanguage analysis of counselor and client verb usage in counseling.

Examined the verb type and noun case role usages of a counselor and client from the 1st, 11th, and 25th interviews in a single counseling case, using the rationale from a computer-assisted language analysis system and a case grammar approach. The analysis indicated that the participants were remarkably similar in the frequency with which they used (a) specific verb types and (b) case roles of particular noun phrases within each interview. Moreover, Ss were similar in their changes to higher or lower frequencies of these units of linguistic structure over the 3 interviews. The counselor and client appear to be "tracking" each other in their use of given verb types as methods for relating named things to each other. In the beginning of the series, the majority of verbs that both participants used identified the client member of the pair as the agent of some action. By the end of the series, a majority of verbs that both participants were using identified the client as the object of some inner state, or as the experiencer of a psychological process of feeling, sensing, or knowing. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the relation between verb inflection and verb position in Dutch agrammatic aphasics

This study focuses on the relation between verb position and verb inflection in the speech production of Dutch agrammatic patients. In Dutch, the finite verb is moved to second position in the matrix clause (de jongen leest een boek: the boy reads a book), but remains in its base generated, that is final, position in the embedded clause (ik zie dat de jongen een boek leest: lit. I see that the boy a book reads). Nonfinite verbs (infinitives and participles) are always in clause final position. Spontaneous speech analysis shows that agrammatics are sensitive to this relation between finiteness and structural position, although they are reluctant to produce finite verbs. Experimental data shows that verb inflection as such is not the problem: these patients are perfectly able to produce a finite verb in final position in an embedded clause; this is not more difficult than producing a nonfinite verb in the same position. If the finite verb has to be produced in Verb Second position in the matrix clause, however, the patients' performance drops dramatically.     

Young children learn to produce passives with nonce verbs

Younger and older children (mean ages = 2 years 11 months and 3 years 5 months) learned 2 nonce verbs in a full passive or active transitive construction. When asked patient-focused questions encouraging passive-voice replies (e.g., "What happened to the ball?") or agent-focused questions encouraging active-voice replies (e.g., "What did Elmo do?"), children used a variety of strategies to meet the demands of the questions, usually without changing the construction in which the verb occurred. In Study 2 in which passive and active constructions were primed, 40% of the almost 3-year-old children used an active-introduced verb in a passive construction and 35% used a passive-introduced verb in an active transitive construction when discourse demands encouraged them to do so. Thus, before their 3rd birthdays, some children have an understanding of the passive and active transitive constructions general enough to support productive usages with newly learned verbs.     

Processing ambiguous verbs: Evidence from eye movements.

In 2 eye-tracking experiments, participants read verbs that had 2 (unrelated) meanings or 2 (related) senses in contexts that disambiguated before or after the verb, to the dominant or subordinate interpretation. A 3rd experiment used unambiguous verbs. The results indicated that the language processor used information about context in the early stages of resolving meaning ambiguities but only during integration for sense ambiguities. Effects of preference were delayed for both types of verbs. The results contrast with findings concerning the processing of nouns (e.g., K. Rayner & S. A. Duffy, 1986). For meaning ambiguities, the authors argue that delays in resolution allow both meanings to reach a high level of activation, thus reducing effects of frequency. For sense ambiguities, the authors argue that the processor does not access multiple senses but activates one underspecified meaning and uses context to home in on the appropriate sense. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Neural Basis for Verb Processing in Alzheimer's Disease: An fMRI Study.

Patients with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) have difficulty understanding verbs. To investigate the neural basis for this deficit, the authors used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine patterns of neural activation during verb processing in 11 AD patients compared with 16 healthy seniors. Subjects judged the pleasantness of verbs, including MOTION verbs and COGNITION verbs. Healthy seniors and AD patients both activated posterolateral temporal and inferior frontal regions during judgments of verbs. These activations were relatively reduced and somewhat changed in their anatomic distribution in AD patients compared with healthy seniors, particularly for the subcategory of MOTION verbs, but AD patients showed minimal activation in association with COGNITION verbs. These findings imply that poor performance with verbs in AD is due in part to altered activation of the large-scale neural network that supports verb processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Developing organization of mental verbs and theory of mind in middle childhood: Evidence from extensions": Correction to Schwanenflugel et al. (1998).

Reports an error in "Developing organization of mental verbs and theory of mind in middle childhood: Evidence from extensions" by Paula J. Schwanenflugel, Robbie L. Henderson and William V. Fabricius (Developmental Psychology, 1998[May], Vol 34[3], 512-524). In this article, Figures 2 and 4 were inadvertently switched. The figure appearing on page 519 is Figure 4, and the data pertain to third graders; the figure appearing on page 521 is Figure 2, and the data pertain to adults. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 1998-01885-012.) The purpose of the study was to assess developments in the theory of mind suggested by changes in the organization of cognitive verb extensions during the elementary school years. Adults and 3rd- and 5th-grade children were provided with a set of mental activity scenarios and were asked to select the best verbs from a list of cognitive verbs that might apply to each scenario. Changes in organization were assessed by examining overlapping uses of cognitive verbs in different contexts. There were 3 major changes with development: (a) the understanding of the role of memory in input functions increased, (b) the interrelatedness of memory- and comprehension-related verbs increased, and (c) the importance of cognitive certainty and uncertainty engaged by constructive processing verbs increased. Together, these findings suggest that a constructivist theory of mind develops in later childhood. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)