Linguistic Cues for Verb Meaning

动词含义的语言线索

• 批准号: 9113580
• 负责人: Cynthia Fisher
• 金额: $ 19.38万
• 依托单位: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 1992
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1992-02-01 至 1996-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9113580&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Linguistic; Cues; Verb; Meaning

ABSTRACT The research explores the availability and usefulness of linguistic cues to verb meaning that might help the child learner to choose among the multitude of hypotheses consistent with observation of world events. This approach, known as syntactic bootstrapping, involves the use of syntactic information about verbs to constrain inferences about their meaning. One line of research looks at the judgments of adult speakers of English to ask what inferences from syntax to semantics are supported by the language. Subjects will make judgments of semantic similarity between verbs, building up a picture of semantic relatedness within a set of verbs. Other subjects will judge sentences for acceptability, providing information about the structural properties of the same verbs. Statistical comparisons of these two data sets will determine whether various syntactic distinctions among verbs match semantic differences. A second line of research explores what children know about syntax/meaning relations, and whether they will make form-to-meaning inferences in interpreting novel verbs. Preschoolers are shown video-taped scenes, and asked to interpret a nonsense verb used to describe them. The question of interest here is whether their interpretations of the same scene change depending on the sentence structure in which the nonsense verb is presented.

摘要 该研究探讨了动词含义的语言线索的可用性和有用性，这可能有助于儿童学习者在与世界事件观察一致的众多假设中进行选择。 这种方法称为句法引导，涉及使用动词的句法信息来限制对其含义的推断。 其中一项研究着眼于成年英语使用者的判断，以了解该语言支持从句法到语义的哪些推论。 受试者将对动词之间的语义相似性进行判断，建立一组动词内语义相关性的图景。 其他受试者将判断句子的可接受性，提供有关相同动词的结构属性的信息。 这两个数据集的统计比较将确定动词之间的各种句法差异是否与语义差异相匹配。 第二项研究探讨了孩子们对句法/意义关系的了解，以及他们在解释新动词时是否会进行形式到意义的推论。 学龄前儿童会看到录像场景，并被要求解释一个用来描述这些场景的无意义动词。 这里有趣的问题是，他们对同一场景的解释是否会根据无意义动词所呈现的句子结构而变化。