The role of input frequency and semantic transparency in the acquisition of verb meaning: evidence from placement verbs in Tamil and Dutch
| Autor: | Marianne Gullberg, Bhuvana Narasimhan |
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| Rok vydání: | 2010 |
| Předmět: |
Cross-Cultural Comparison
Male Linguistics and Language Tamil Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Verb Language Development Language and Linguistics Psycholinguistics Morpheme Phonetics Developmental and Educational Psychology Humans Child General Psychology Contrastive linguistics Netherlands General Language Studies and Linguistics caused posture verbs placement events Dravidian languages Indo-European languages Verbal Learning Language acquisition Linguistics language.human_language child language acquisition Semantics Child Preschool language semantic transparency Female Psychology input frequency Dutch Comprehension Communicative Competences |
| Zdroj: | Journal of Child Language; 38(3), pp 504-532 (2011) Journal of Child Language, 38, 504-532 Journal of Child Language, 38, 3, pp. 504-532 Journal of Child Language |
| ISSN: | 1469-7602 0305-0009 |
| Popis: | We investigate how Tamil- and Dutch-speaking adults and four- to five-year-old children use caused posture verbs (‘ lay/stand a bottle on a table ’) to label placement events in which objects are oriented vertically or horizontally. Tamil caused posture verbs consist of morphemes that individually label the causal and result subevents (nikka veyyii ‘make stand ’; paDka veyyii ‘make lie ’), occurring in situational and discourse contexts where object orientation is at issue. Dutch caused posture verbs are less semantically transparent : they are monomorphemic (zetten ‘set/stand ’; leggen ‘ lay’), often occurring in contexts where factors other than object orientation determine use. Caused posture verbs occur rarely in Tamil input corpora ; in Dutch input, they are used frequently. Elicited production data reveal that Tamil four-year-olds use infrequent placement verbs appropriately [*] We gratefully acknowledge the cooperation of the teachers and students of the Ramakrishna Mission Tamil Medium School (Chennai, India) and Kindercentrum Dribbel (Molenhoek, the Netherlands). We are also grateful for funding from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. We wish to express our thanks to Judith Bindels, Pauline Chew, Bregje Esmeijer, Anke Jolink, Femke Uijtdewilligen, Arna Van Doorn, Shanmugam Mohan and R. Devi for help with the data collection and analysis, and Melissa Bowerman, Asifa Majid and Leah Roberts for comments on the design and analysis of the study. Our thanks also go to the reviewers of this paper who provided us with valuable suggestions. Any remaining errors are solely ours. Address for corre |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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