Linguistic Cues for Verb Meaning

摘要 该研究探讨了 可能有助于儿童学习者的动词意义的语言线索 在众多的假设中做出选择， 观察世界事件。 这种方法，被称为句法 自举，涉及使用语法信息， 动词来限制对它们意义的推断。 的一行 研究着眼于成年人的英语判断， 询问从语法到语义的推理支持什么 语言 受试者会对语义相似性做出判断 在动词之间，建立一个语义相关的图片 在一组动词中。 其他科目将判断判决 可接受性，提供有关结构的信息 相同动词的属性。 这些数据的统计比较 两个数据集将确定是否各种句法 动词之间的区别与语义差异相匹配。 第二 一系列研究探索了儿童对句法/意义的了解 关系，以及他们是否会做出形式到意义的推论 解释新的动词。 学龄前儿童观看录像带 场景，并要求解释一个无意义的动词用来描述 他们 这里的问题是， 对同一场景的解释会根据 出现无意义动词的句子结构。

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.