Children use verb semantics to retreat from overgeneralization errors: A novel verb grammaticality judgment study

Cognitive Linguistics

Volumn 22, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 303-323

  Ambridge, Ben ^a   Pine, Julian M ^a   Rowland, Caroline F ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Argument structure overgeneralization error; entrenchment; intransitive; no negative evidence problem; retreat from overgeneralization; semantic verb class hypothesis; transitive

Indexed keywords

EID: 79954577493     PISSN: 09365907     EISSN: 16133641     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1515/COGL.2011.012     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. Albright, Adam & Bruce Hayes. 2003. Rules vs. analogy in English past tenses: A computational/ experimental study. Cognition 90, 119-161. (Pubitemid 37356937)
2. Ambridge, Ben & Elena V. M. Lieven. 2011. Child language acquisition: Contrasting theoretical approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3. Ambridge, Ben. 2009. "Retreat" from argument-structure overgeneralization errors as a consequence of the acquisition of verb and construction semantics. Paper presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, April 2009, Denver: CO, USA.
4. Ambridge, Ben. 2010. Children's judgments of regular and irregular novel past tense forms: New data on the English past-tense debate. Developmental Psychology 46(6), 1497-1504.
5. Ambridge, Ben. submitted .Testing a probabilistic semantic account of the formation and restriction of linguistic generalizations: A grammaticality judgment study.
6. Ambridge, Ben. submitted b. Island constraints and overgeneralization in language acquisition: A reply to Kalyan.
7. Ambridge, Ben, Anna Theakston, Elena V. M. Lieven & Michael Tomasello. 2006. The distributed learning effect for children's acquisition of an abstract grammatical construction. Cognitive Development 21, 174-193. (Pubitemid 43422585)
8. Ambridge, Ben & Adele E. Goldberg. 2008. The island status of clausal complements: evidence in favor of an information structure explanation. Cognitive Linguistics, 19(3), 349-381.
9. Ambridge, Ben, Julian M. Pine, Caroline F. Rowland, Rebecca L. Jones & Victoria Clark. 2009. A Semantics-Based Approach to the "No Negative Evidence" Problem. Cognitive Science, 33(7), 1301-1316.
10. Ambridge, Ben, Julian M. Pine, Caroline F. Rowland & Chris R. Young. 2008. The effect of verb semantic class and verb frequency (entrenchment) on children's and adults' graded judgements of argument-structure overgeneralization errors. Cognition. 106(1), 87-129. (Pubitemid 350236120)
11. Bowerman, Melissa. 1988. The "no negative evidence" problem: How do children avoid constructing an overly general grammar? In John A. Hawkins (ed.) Explaining language universals, 73-101. Oxford: Blackwell.
12. Bowerman, Melissa. 1990. Mapping thematic roles onto syntactic functions: Are children helped by innate linking rules? Linguistics 28, 1251-1289.
13. Bowerman, Melissa. 1996. Argument structure and learnability: Is a solution in sight? Paper presented at the Proceedings of the twenty-second annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Berkeley, California.
14. Bowerman, Melissa & William Croft. 2007. The acquisition of the English causative alternation. In Melissa Bowerman & Penelope Brown (eds.) Crosslinguistic perspectives on argument structure: Implications for learnability. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
15. Boyd, Jeremy K. & Adele, E. Goldberg. in press. Learning what not to say: The role of statistical preemption and categorization in 'a-adjective' production. Language.
16. Braine, Martin D. S. & Patricia J. Brooks. 1995. Verb argument structure and the problem of avoiding an overgeneral grammar. In Michael Tomasello & William E. Merriman (eds.) Beyond names for things: Young children's acquisition of verbs, 352-376. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
17. Brooks, Patricia J. & Michael Tomasello. 1999. How children constrain their argument-structure constructions. Language, 75(4), 720-738.
18. Brooks, Patricia J. & Otto Zizak. 2002. Does preemption help children learn verb transitivity? Journal of Child Language 29(4), 759-781.
19. Brooks, Patricia J., Michael Tomasello, Kelly Dodson & Laurence B. Lewis. 1999. Young children's overgeneralizations with fixed transitivity verbs. Child Development 70(6), 1325-1337.
20. Bybee, Joan. 1995. Regular morphology and the lexicon. Language and cognitive processes, 10(5), 425-455.
21. Chang, Franklin. 2002. Symbolically speaking: A connectionist model of sentence production. Cognitive Science 26, 609-651.
22. Chang, Franklin, Gary S. Dell & Kay Bock. 2006. Becoming syntactic. Psychological Review 113(2), 234-272. (Pubitemid 43815197)
23. Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton
24. Chouinard, Michelle M. & Eve V. Clark. 2003. Adult reformulations of child errors as negative evidence. Journal of Child Language 30(3), 637-669. (Pubitemid 37110159)
25. Croft, William. 1991. Possible verbs and the structure of events. In Savas Tsohatzidis (ed.), Meaning and Prototypes, 48-73. London: Routledge.
26. Croft, William. 2001. Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
27. Da̧browska, Ewa & Elena V. M. Lieven. 2005. Towards a lexically specific grammar of children's question constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 16(3), 437-474. (Pubitemid 41329327)
28. Farrar, Michael J. 1992. Negative evidence and grammatical morpheme acquisition. Developmental Psychology 28(1), 90-98.
29. Forrester, Neil, & Kim Plunkett, K. 1994. Learning the Arabic plural: The case of minority default mappings in connectionist networks. Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
30. Goldberg, Adele E. 1995. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
31. Hare, Mary, Jeff L. Elman & Kim G. Daugherty. 1995. Default Generalisation in Connectionist Networks. Language and cognitive processes 10(6), 601-630. (Pubitemid 126032126)
32. Haspelmath, Martin. 1993. More on the typology of inchoative/causative verb alternations. In B. Comrie & M. Polinsky (eds.) Causatives and transitivity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Kalyan, Siva. submitted. Similarity in linguistic categorization, part 1: The role of shared features.
33. Kay, Paul & Charles J. Fillmore. 1999. Grammatical constructions and linguistic generalizations: The What's X doing Y? construction. Language 75(1), 1-33.
34. Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of cognitive grammar, Volume 1. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
35. Langacker, Ronald W. 2000. A dynamic usage-based model. In Michael Barlow & Suzanne Kemmer (eds.) Usage-based models of language, 1-63. Stanford: CSLI.
36. Levin, Beth & Malka Rappaport Hovav. 1995. Unaccusativity: At the syntax-lexical semantics interface. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
37. Li, Ping & Brian Macwhinney. 1996. Cryptotype, overgeneralization, and competition: A connectionist model of the learning of English reversive prefixes. Connection Science 8, 3-30.
38. Macwhinney, Brian. 1987. The competition model. In Brian Macwhinney (ed.) Mechanisms of language acquisition, 249-308. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
39. MacWhinney, Brian. 2004. A multiple process solution to the logical problem of language acquisition. Journal of Child Language 31(4), 883-914.
40. Marcotte, Jean. P. 2005. Causative alternation errors as event-driven construction paradigm completions. In Eve V. Clark & Barbara F. Kelly (eds.) Constructions in acquisition. Stanford, CA: CSLI.
41. Marcus, Gary F. 1993. Negative evidence in language acquisition. Cognition 46(1), 53-85.
42. Michaelis, Laura A. & Josef Ruppenhofer. 2001. Beyond alternations: A constructional model of the applicative pattern in German. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
43. Pinker, Steven. 1989. Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
44. Plunkett, Kim & Ramin C. Nakisa. 1997. A connectionist model of the Arabic plural system. Language and cognitive processes 12(5- 6), 807-836.
45. Pye, Clifton & Dianne F. Loeb. 1998. Experimenting with the causative alternation. Unpublished manuscript.
46. Saxton, Matthew. 2000. Negative evidence and negative feedback: Immediate Effects on the grammaticality of child speech. First Language 3(60), 221-252.
47. Stefanowitsch, Anatol. 2008. Negative evidence and preemption: A constructional approach to ungrammaticality. Cognitive Linguistics 19(3), 513-531.
48. Suttle, Laura. & Adele E. Goldberg. in press. The partial productivity of constructions as induction. Linguistics.
49. Theakston, Anna L. 2004. The role of entrenchment in children's and adults' performance on grammaticality-judgement tasks. Cognitive Development 19(1), 15-34. (Pubitemid 38148374)
50. Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
51. Van Hoek, Karin. 1997. Anaphora and conceptual structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
52. Whorf, Benjamin. 1956. Thinking in primitive communities. In John Bissell Carroll (ed.) Language, thought and reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
53. Wolff, Philip. 2003. Direct causation in the linguistic coding and individuation of causal events. Cognition 88, 1-48. (Pubitemid 36438709)
54. Wonnacott, Elizabeth A., Elissa L. Newport & Michael K. Tanenhaus. 2008. Acquiring and processing verb argument structure: Distributional learning in a miniature language. Cognitive Psychology 56, 165-209.