Hostname: page-component-6bf8c574d5-n2sc8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-03-06T23:12:26.876Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Morphological cues to verb meaning: verb inflections and the initial mapping of verb meanings*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Douglas A. Behrend ,
L. Lynn Harris  and
Kelly B. Cartwright
Douglas A. Behrend*
Affiliation:
University of Arkansas
L. Lynn Harris
Affiliation:
University of Arkansas
Kelly B. Cartwright
Affiliation:
University of Arkansas
*
Department of Psychology, 216 Memorial Hall, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 72701, USA.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The present studies investigated children's use of verb inflections to guide their initial mapping of verb meanings. Given that children initially apply the progressive -ing inflection to verbs denoting actions and the past -ed inflection to verbs denoting results of events, two studies were conducted to investigate whether children use these inflections during mapping of novel verb meanings. In both studies, subjects were taught novel verbs and were asked to extend those verbs to events in which the action or result differed from events used to teach the verbs. It was predicted that subjects would be less likely to extend verbs inflected with -ing to events with new actions and would be less likely to extend verbs inflected with -ed to events with new results. Eighteeen three- and five-year-olds and 24 adults participated in Experiment 1 in a between-subjects design that produced weak effects for the youngest subjects tested. Experiment 2 tested 16 three-year-olds and 19 five-year-olds in a within-subjects design and produced the predicted effect for three-year-olds, but not for five-year-olds. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for early verb learning and regarding the use of the bootstrapping construct in language acquisition research.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , February 1995 , pp. 89 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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

[*]

This research was supported by funding from the Marie Wilson Howells Fund in the Department of Psychology at the University of Arkansas. The authors give thanks to the children and parents who participated in these studies, and to the director and staff of the Evergreen Children's Academy for their interest and co-operation. Thanks also to Karen Strain and Tammy McCollum for assistance with data collection and coding.

References

REFERENCES

Antinucci, F. & Miller, R. (1976). How children talk about what happened. Journal of Child Languages 3, 167–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Behrend, D. A. (1989). Default values in verb frames: cognitive biases for learning verb meanings. Proceedings of the 11th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Behrend, D. A. (1990). The development of verb concepts: children's use of verbs to label familiar and novel events. Child Development 61, 681–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Behrend, D. A. (1991). Beyond natural partitioning: the development of the verb lexicon. Unpublished manuscript, University of Arkansas.Google Scholar
Bloom, L., Lifter, K. & Hafitz, J. (1980). The semantics of verbs and the development of verb inflection in child language. Language 56, 386–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bohannon, J. N. III, & Stanowicz, L. (1988). The issue of negative evidence: adult responses to children's language errors. Developmental Psychology 24, 684–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bronckart, J. P. & Sinclair, H. (1973). Tense, time, and aspect. Cognition 2, 107–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, R. (1957). Linguistic determinism and the part of speech. Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology 55, 1–5.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Comrie, B. (1976). Aspect: an introduction to the study of verbal aspect and related problems. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Comrie, B. (1985). Tense. Cambridge: C.U.P.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cziko, G. A. (1989). A review of the state-process and punctual-nonpunctual distinctions in children's acquisition of verbs. First Language 9, 1–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Farrar, M. J. (1992). Negative evidence and grammatical morpheme acquisition. Developmental Psychology 28, 90–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Forbes, J. N. & Farrar, M. J. (1993). Children's initial assumptions about the meaning of novel motion verbs: biased and conservative? Cognitive Development 8, 273–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gelman, S. A. & Taylor, M. (1984). How two-year-old children interpret proper and common names for unfamiliar objects. Child Development 55, 1535–40.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gentner, D. (1978). On relational meaning: the aquisition of verb meaning. Child Development 49, 988–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gleitman, L. (1991). The structural sources of verb meanings. Language Acquisition 1, 3–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Golinkoff, R. M., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Bailey, L. M. & Wenger, N. R. (1992). Young children and adults use lexical principles to learn new nouns. Developmental Psychology 28, 99–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gropen, J., Pinker, S., Hollander, S. & Goldberg, R. (1991). Syntax and semantics in the acquisition of locative verbs. Journal of Child Language 18, 115–51.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Harner, L. (1981). Children talk about the time and aspect of actions. Child Development 52, 498–506.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huttenlocher, J., Smiley, P. & Charney, R. (1983). The emergence of action categories in the child: evidence from verb meaning. Psychological Review 90, 72–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Katz, N., Baker, E. & Macnamara, J. (1974). What's in a name? A study of how children learn common and proper names. Child Development 45, 469–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kelley, D. J. & Rice, M. L. (1991). The effect of verb content on children's initial referential selections. Paper presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Seattle, WA.Google Scholar
Landau, B. & Gleitman, L. R. (1985). Language and experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Markman, E. M. & Wachtel, G. F. (1988). Children's use of mutual exclusivity to constrain the meanings of words. Cognitive Psychology 20, 121–57.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McShane, J. & Whittaker, S. (1988). The encoding of tense and aspect by three- to five-year-old children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 45, 52–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merriman, W. E. & Bowman, L. (1989). The mutual exclusivity bias in children's word learning. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 54 (3&4, Serial No. 220).CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Naigles, L. (1990). Children use syntax to learn verb meanings. Journal of Child Language 17, 357–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pinker, S. (1984). Language learnability and language development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Shatz, M. (1988). Bootstrapping operations in child language. In Nelson, K. E. (ed.), Children's language. Vol. 6. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Taylor, M. & Gelman, S. A. (1988). Adjectives and nouns: children's strategies for learning new words. Child Development 59, 411–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M. (1992). First verbs. Cambridge: C.U.P.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M. & Kruger, A. C. (1992). Joint attention on actions: acquiring verbs in ostensive and non-ostensive contexts. Journal of Child Language 19, 311–33.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Weist, R. M. (1986). Tense and aspect. In Fletcher, P. & Garman, M. (eds), Language acquisition: studies in first language development. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Weist, R. M., Wysocka, H., Witkowska-Stadnik, K., Buczowska, E. & Konieczna, E. (1985). The defective tense hypothesis: on the emergence of tense and aspect in child Polish. Journal of Child Language 11, 347–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar