ABSTRACT

Perception verbs and mental verbs have significant overlap in their syntax and semantics; both reference mental representations when taking embedded clauses, as in I see that Maria was here and I think that Maria was here. Some have suggested that perception is more accessible for young children than mental states, raising the question of whether perception verbs could serve as a semantic model for the acquisition of mental verbs via their shared syntax. Since embedded clauses are key to referencing mental states for both verb classes, we examine the developmental trajectory of perception vs. mental verbs in these constructions and others. Using a sample of 5,884 child-produced utterances and 8,313 parent-produced utterances from the Brown and Gleason corpora of CHILDES, we analyze children’s production of perception and mental verbs in their syntactic frames, as well as that of their parents. We find that children begin to produce embedded frames for both perception and mental verbs around the same time, but produce embedded frames with mental verbs more often, especially as they get older, despite greater use of perception verbs overall. These patterns do not reflect parental input: parents produce both verb types with similar frequency and use embedded frames more often than their children. These findings suggest that perception verbs are unlikely to serve as a model for mental verbs, and instead that mental verbs and their regular occurrence with embedded frames may provide a model for perception verbs when the latter reference mental states. We propose a semantic updating account for children’s acquisition of perception verbs, arguing that children’s early knowledge of perception verbs may not include mental state representations as a component of their meaning, and that this may only develop later as children learn the propositional syntax that is shared by and regularly occurs with mental verbs.

摘要

感知动词和心理动词在句法和语义上有很大的重叠。两者都在采用嵌入从句时引用了心理表征，如我所见，玛丽亚在这里，我认为玛丽亚在这里。一些人认为，相比于精神状态，年幼的儿童更容易获得知觉，这就提出了一个问题，即知觉动词是否可以用作通过共享句法获取心理动词的语义模型。由于嵌入式从句是两个动词类都引用心理状态的关键，因此我们在这些结构和其他结构中考察了感知与心理动词的发展轨迹。使用来自CHILDES的Brown和Gleason语料库的5884个儿童产生的话语和8313个父母产生的话语的样本，我们分析了儿童以及他们的父母在句法框架中的感知和心理动词的产生。我们发现孩子们大约在同一时间开始为感知和​​心理动词产生嵌入的框架，但是更频繁地产生带有心理动词的嵌入框架，尤其是随着年龄的增长，尽管整体上更多地使用了感知动词。这些模式不能反映父母的输入：父母产生的两种动词类型具有相似的频率，并且比孩子更频繁地使用嵌入的框架。这些发现表明，感知动词不太可能充当心理动词的模型，相反，当心理动词及其嵌入框架的规律出现时，感知动词可能会为后者提供心理状态的模型。我们为儿童获得感知动词提出了一个语义更新说明，认为儿童对感知动词的早期了解可能不包括心理状态表示作为其含义的组成部分，并且只有在儿童学习共享的命题语法后，才会发展这种状态。并经常与心理动词一起出现。