Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T16:08:25.523Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 September 2011

AYUMI MATSUO ,
SOTARO KITA ,
YURI SHINYA ,
GARY C. WOOD  and
LETITIA NAIGLES
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: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , June 2012 , pp. 637 - 663
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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).

References

REFERENCES

Baker, M. (1988). Incorporation, a theory of grammatical function changing. Unpublished PhD dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Bever, T. G. (1970). The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In Hayes, J. R. (ed.), Cognition and the development of language, 279–362. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Bowerman, M. & Brown, P. (2007). Crosslinguistic perspectives on argument structure: Implications for learnability. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Clancy, P. (1985). The acquisition of Japanese. In Slobin, D. I. (ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition, Vol. 1. The data, 839–80. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Dittmar, M., Abbot-Smith, K., Lieven, E. & Tomasello, M. (2008). German children's comprehension of word order and case marking in causative sentences. Child Development 79, 1152–67.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
DuBois, J. (1987). The discourse basis of ergativity. Language 63, 42–52.Google Scholar
Farmer, A. (1980). On the interaction of morphology and syntax. Unpublished PhD dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Fillmore, C. J. (1968). The case for Case. In Bach, E. & Harms, R. (eds), Universals in linguistic theory, 1–90. Toronto: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar
Fisher, C. (1996). Structural limits on verb mapping: The role of analogy in children's interpretations of sentences. Cognitive Psychology 31, 41–81.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fisher, C., Hall, G., Rakowitz, S. & Gleitman, L. (1994). When it is better to receive than to give: Syntactic and conceptual constraints on vocabulary growth. Lingua 92, 333–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fukuda, M. (1993). Head government and case marker drop in Japanese. Linguistic Inquiry 24(1), 168–72.Google Scholar
Gleitman, L. R. (1990). The structural sources of verb meanings. Language Acquisition 1, 3–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Göksun, T, Küntay, A. C. & Naigles, L. (2008). Turkish children use morphosyntactic bootstrapping in interpreting verb meaning. Journal of Child Language 35, 291–323.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goldberg, A. E. (2004). But do we need universal grammar? A comment on Litz et al. (2003). Cognition 94, 77–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Golinkoff, R. M., Jacquet, R., Hirsh-Pasek, K. & Nandakumar, R. (1996). Lexical principles may underlie the learning of verbs. Child Development 67(6), 3101–119.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Guerriero, S., Oshima-Takane, Y. & Kuriyama, Y. (2006). The development of referential choice in English and Japanese: A discourse−pragmatic perspective. Journal of Child Language 3, 823–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hakuta, K. (1982). Interaction between particles and word order in the comprehension and production of simple sentences in Japanese children. Developmental Psychology 18, 62–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hale, K. (1980). Remarks on Japanese phrase structure: Comments on the papers on Japanese syntax in Theoretical Issues in Japanese Linguistics. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 2, 185–203.Google Scholar
Hoji, H. (1985). Logical form constraints and configurational structures in Japanese. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Washington.Google Scholar
Ishii, T. (1999). The JUN Corpus. Unpublished.Google Scholar
Kuno, S. (1972). Functional Sentence Perspective: A case study from Japanese and English. Linguistic Inquiry 3(3), 269–320.Google Scholar
Kuroda, S.-Y. (1979) Generative grammatical studies in the Japanese language. New York: Garland Publishing.Google Scholar
Landau, B. & Gleitman, L. R. (1985). Language and experience: evidence from the blind child. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Lee, J. & Naigles, L. (2008). Mandarin learners use syntactic bootstrapping in verb acquisition. Cognition 106(2), 1028–37.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
MacWhinney, B (2000). The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk. Vol. 1: Transcription format and programs. Volume 2: The database. 3rd edn.Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Morikawa, H. (1989). Acquisition of case marking and predicate−argument structures in Japanese: A longitudinal study of language acquisition mechanisms. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Kansas.Google Scholar
Naigles, L. R. (1990). Children use syntax to learn verb meanings. Journal of Child Language 17, 357–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Naigles, L., Bavin, E. & Smith, M. (2005). Toddlers recognize verbs in novel situations and sentences. Developmental Science 8, 424–31.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Naigles, L. & Kako, E. (1993). First contact in verb acquisition. Child Development 64(6), 1665–87.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Narasimhan, B., Budwig, N. & Murty, L. (2005). Argument realization in Hindi caregiver–child discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 37(4), 461–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nishiyama, K. (1999). Adjectives and the copulas in Japanese. Journal of East Asian Languages 8, 183–222.Google Scholar
Okubo, A. (1967). Yooji gengo no hattatsu [Development of Child Language]. Tokyp: Tokyodo.Google Scholar
Quine, W. V. O. (1960). Word and object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Rispoli, M. (1987). The acquisition of the transitive and intransitive action verb categories in Japanese. First Language 7, 183–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rispoli, M. (1989). Encounters with Japanese verbs: Caregiver sentences and the categorization of transitive and intransitive action verbs. First Language 9, 57–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rispoli, M. (1991). The acquisition of verb subcategorization in a functionalist framework. First Language 11(31), 41–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rispoli, M. (1995). Missing arguments and the acquisition of predicate meanings. In Tomasello, M. & Merriman, W. E. (eds), Beyond names for things: Young children's acquisition of verbs, 331–52. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Ross, J. R. (1969). Guess who? In Binnick, Robert I., Davison, Alice, Green, Georgia M. and Morgan, Jerry L. (eds), Papers from the Fifth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 252–86. Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistic Society, University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Saito, M. (1985). Some asymmetries in Japanese and their theoretical implications. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Schafer, G. & Plunkett, K. (1998) Rapid word learning by fifteen-month-olds under tightly controlled conditions. Child Development 69, 309–320.Google ScholarPubMed
Shibamoto, J. (1985). Japanese women's language. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Shibatani, M. (1990). The languages of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Shibatani, M. (2001). Non-canonical constructions in Japanese. In Aikhenvald, A. Y., Dixon, R. M. W. & Onishi, M. (eds), Non-canonical marking of subjects and objects, 307–348. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Suzuki, T. (2000). Multiple factors in morphological case-marking errors. Studies in Language Science 1, 123–34.Google Scholar
Swensen, L., Kelley, E., Fein, D. & Naigles, L. (2007). Children with autism display typical language learning characteristics: Evidence from preferential looking. Child Development 78, 542–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Takezawa, K. (1987). A configurational approach to case marking in Japanese. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Washington.Google Scholar
Yokoyama, M. (1997). Bumpo no kakutoku (2) [Acquisition of Grammar]. In Kobayashi, H. & Sasaki, M. (eds), Kodomotati no gengo kakutoku in, 131–51. Tokyo: Taishukan.Google Scholar