Linguistic Cues for Verb Meaning

摘要本研究探讨了动词意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观察世界事件相一致的众多假设中进行选择。这种方法被称为句法引导（syntactic bootstrapping），涉及使用动词的句法信息来约束对其含义的推断。一项研究着眼于成年英语使用者的判断，以询问语言支持从语法到语义的哪些推论。被试会对动词之间的语义相似性做出判断，从而在一组动词中建立语义关联的图景。其他主语会判断句子的可接受性，提供关于同一个动词的结构属性的信息。对这两个数据集进行统计比较，可以确定动词之间的各种句法差异是否与语义差异相匹配。第二项研究探索儿童对句法/意义关系的了解程度，以及他们在解释新动词时是否会进行形式-意义推理。研究人员向学龄前儿童播放视频场景，并要求他们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，他们对同一个场景的解释是否会随着无意义动词出现的句子结构而改变。

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.