Doctoral Dissertation Research: Causal Representations in Children's Transitive Sentences

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This Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant will support the work of doctoral student Melissa Kline under the direction of Dr. Edward Gibson.The structures of sentences contain clues to their meanings. A nonsense sentence like "The dax gorped the blicket to the voom" allows for some initial guesses: 'gorping' probably means something about sending or transferring. The research carried out in this project will address the issue of how children learn the rules that match sentence meanings with sentence form. An important test for this question is a basic sentence type, the transitive sentence (e.g. "Jane broke the lamp.") Across languages, transitive sentences are reliably used to describe causal events, but some languages like English also allow for other kinds of meanings (e.g. "Jane liked the lamp.") Even so, adult speakers tend to expect new transitive verbs to refer to causal events. Do children use a similar strategy to help them learn new verbs? Depending on the learning biases children use and the input they hear from their parents, children might make very different guesses than adults about new verb meanings.To test these questions we will examine the guesses that toddlers make about the meaning of a novel word like 'daxing.' Co-PI Kline will also use conversation transcripts to compare these guesses to the transitive sentences that parents actually say to their children. Currently, we know that children have a broad preference for certain scenes to match with transitive sentences: a girl pushing a boy in a wheelbarrow is a better guess for "The girl daxed the boy" than a girl and a boy waving their arms separately. In this research Ms. Kline will use what is known about causal perception to create closely matched scene contrasts to discover the specific cues and features that children associate with transitive verbs. This project will contribute to our understanding of how children learn verbs and sentence structures and of how conceptual representations are related to language. Funding this project also contributes to the training of a graduate student.