The role of input frequency and semantic transparency in the acquisition of verb meaning: Evidence from placement verbs in Tamil and Dutch

Summary, in English

We investigate how Tamil- and Dutch-speaking adults and 4- to-5-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 whereas Dutch children use highfrequency placement verbs inappropriately even at age five. Semantic transparency exerts a stronger influence than input frequency in constraining children’s verb meaning acquisition.

• Author: Bhuvana Narasimhan; Marianne Gullberg
• Department/s: General Linguistics; Lund University Humanities Lab; eSSENCE: The e-Science Collaboration
• Publishing year: 2011
• Language: English
• Pages: 504-532
• Publication/Series: Journal of Child Language
• Volume: 38
• Issue: 3
• Full text: - 198 kB; Download statistics
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0305000910000164
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Topic: General Language Studies and Linguistics
• Keywords: semantic transparency; input frequency; placement events; child language acquisition; caused posture verbs; Tamil; Dutch
• Status: Published
• Project: Thinking in Time: Cognition, Communication and Learning
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 1469-7602