Developmental shifts in the construction of verb meanings

This research focused on when and how the argument structure of verbs becomes fully established. To this end, 60 grade-schoolers were presented with 40 sentences to interpret; 16 of the sentences were ungrammatical in that the syntactic frame was inconsistent with the standard argument structure for the verb (e.g., *the tiger goes the lion). Previous work (Naigles, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 1992) indicated that preschoolers faced with ungrammatical sentences will alter the usual meaning of the verbs to fit with the novel frames (so-called Frame Compliance, also referred to as Syntactic Bootstrapping), but adults faced with the same sentences alter the syntax in favor of the usual meaning of the verb (Verb Compliance). Here we sought to document the shift in progress, to determine whether such a change is a general developmental phenomenon, or whether it could be attributed to progress within the linguistic domain in syntax and/or in the verb lexicon. In our findings, grade-school children were still adept at deducing new verb meanings from new syntactic forms; however, this productivity declined in a steady fashion with age, with a corresponding increase in Verb Compliance. Furthermore, the pattern of the decline and increase suggested that some syntactic factors, but lexical factors in particular, exerted significant influence on when and how children shifted away from Frame Compliance.

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