University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The role of syntactic and discourse information in verb learning

Jin, Kyong Sun

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JIN-DISSERTATION-2015.pdf

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/78435

Description

Title
The role of syntactic and discourse information in verb learning
Author(s)
Jin, Kyong Sun
Issue Date
2015-04-22
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Fisher, Cynthia L.
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Fisher, Cynthia
Committee Member(s)
  • Baillargeon, Renée
  • Dell
, Gary
  • Federmeier, Kara
  • Brown-Schmidt, Sarah
Department of Study
Psychology
Discipline
Psychology
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Date of Ingest
2015-07-22T22:17:13Z
Keyword(s)
  • verb learning
  • syntactic bootstrapping
  • discourse
Abstract
Children use syntax in verb learning; this is syntactic bootstrapping (Gleitman, 1990; Naigles, 1990). This dissertation proposal investigates two research questions about syntactic bootstrapping: 1) how syntactic bootstrapping could begin, and 2) how syntactic bootstrapping could work despite noisy input due to argument omission. The first three sets of experiments (Chapters 2) showed that 15- to 19-month-old infants use the number of nouns in a sentence to differentiate novel transitive and intransitive verbs. The results confirm a key prediction of structure-mapping account (Fisher, 1996) suggesting that syntactic bootstrapping might begin with an unlearned bias to assign each noun in the sentence to a core participant-role in conceptual representations of events. Experiments 4 and 5 (Chapter 3) showed that Korean-learning 2-year-old children exploit distributional and discourse information to find true number of arguments of a new verb despite pervasive argument omission. Finally, Chapter 4 (Experiment 6, 7 and 8) asked whether a bias to discourse continuity could aid children’s verb interpretation even in English that allows noun omission only in restricted situations. The results showed that English-learning children also could use discourse continuity to interpret verbs with missing subjects. Taken together, the results of these studies support the conclusion that the inherent one-to-one mapping bias can guide children’s verb learning even in noisy input in any language, with children’s expectation for discourse continuity.
Graduation Semester
2015-5
Type of Resource
text
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/78435
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2015 Kyong Sun Jin

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