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Semantics in Language Acquisition
Edited by Kristen Syrett and Sudha Arunachalam
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 24] 2018
► pp. 154–176

Chapter 7
Not all subjects are agents

Transitivity and meaning in early language comprehension

| University of California Merced
| University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
| University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Children use syntax to guide sentence comprehension and verb learning. We explored the nature of the meanings children infer from syntactic evidence by examining the types of event-roles they can link with the subjects and objects of transitive verbs. In two experiments, 23-month-olds heard a novel verb in a transitive sentence while viewing pairs of events in which one participant acted on another without producing a clear effect (Experiment 1) or one participant moved relative to another without contacting it (Experiment 2). In both cases, children looked longer at the event in which the subject referent played a more prominent role. These findings suggest that children map a highly abstract conceptual-semantic asymmetry onto the syntactic difference between subjects and objects.

Keywords: syntactic bootstrapping, verb learning, language acquisition, thematic roles, transitivity, word order
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Abstract vs. concrete representations of language experience
    • 1.2The semantics of subjects and objects
      • 1.2.1Proto-agents and proto-patients
      • 1.2.2Beyond transitives: The asymmetry of syntax
      • 1.2.3The semantic prominence of subjects: Prior evidence from adults and children
    • 1.3The present research
  • 2.Experiment 1
    • 2.1Method
      • 2.1.1Participants
      • 2.1.2Apparatus
      • 2.1.3Materials and procedure
      • 2.1.4Coding
    • 2.2Results and discussion
  • 3.Experiment 2
    • 3.1Method
      • 3.1.1Participants
      • 3.1.2Apparatus
      • 3.1.3Materials and procedure
      • 3.1.4Coding
    • 3.2Results and discussion
  • 4.General discussion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.24.07sco
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