ABSTRACT

Children acquire argument structure through distributional evidence, but how does this interacts with event semantics and existing verb knowledge? The current study compares verb learning in adult speakers of Japanese (where lexical causatives span wider semantic categories) and English (where alternation is more restricted). In the Fully alternating familiarization, internally caused events (similar to descend) and externally caused events (similar to rock) occurred with novel verbs in transitive and intransitive frames. In the Semi-alternating familiarization, internally caused events occurred with intransitives only while externally caused events occurred with both frames. During the test, participants rated the naturalness of transitive and intransitive descriptions for all events. For internally caused events, transitives were rated equivalently low across speakers after the Semi-alternating familiarization (which featured only intransitives), while intransitives were more felicitous for English compared to Japanese speakers. For externally caused events, all participants rated transitives higher than intransitives, despite equal occurrence across familiarizations. This may be related to the presence of salient animate agents in scenes. Together, this suggests that syntactic and semantic biases concurrently influence the interpretation of distributional evidence. Input statistics are interpreted through existing syntactic representations, and salient semantic distinctions may exert a bias for syntactic instantiations.

摘要

儿童通过分布证据获得论证结构，但是这如何与事件语义和现有动词知识相互作用？当前的研究比较了成年日语（动词词法涵盖较广泛的语义类别）和英语（交际更受限制）的成年说话者的动词学习。在完全交替熟悉中，内部事件（类似于下降）和外部事件（类似于摇滚））发生在及物和不及物动词框架中的新动词上。在半交替熟悉中，内部原因的事件仅与不及物动词一起发生，而外部原因的事件在两个框架中都发生。在测试过程中，参与者对所有事件的可传递性和不传递性描述的自然程度进行了评估。对于内部事件，在半交替熟悉后（仅具有不及物性的特征），在所有说话者中，和声的等级均等低，而英语的不及物性则比日语讲者更适合。对于外部事件，尽管熟悉程度相同，但所有参与者对可及物的评价都高于不及物。这可能与场景中存在明显的动画代理有关。一起，这表明句法和语义偏向同时影响分布证据的解释。输入统计信息通过现有的句法表示法进行解释，而显着的语义区别可能会对句法实例化产生偏见。