Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-q6k6v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-10T19:04:26.408Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

CATEGORIES IN THE MAKING: Assessing the role of semantics in the acquisition of noun and verb categories1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 January 2012

CAROLINE ROSSI  and
CHRISTOPHE PARISSE
CAROLINE ROSSI*
Affiliation:
Université Lyon 2. Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage
CHRISTOPHE PARISSE*
Affiliation:
MoDyCo, INSERM, CNRS, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense
*
Addresses for correspondence: Caroline Rossi, (Centre de Recherche en Terminologie et Traduction), Université Lumière Lyon 2, 86, rue Pasteur, 69007 Lyon, France e-mail: Caroline.Rossi@univ-lyon2.fr
Christophe Parisse, Modyco, Bat A, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, 200 Avenue de la République, 92001 Nanterre cedex, France e-mail: cparisse@u-paris10.fr
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Little is known about what guides children in their acquisition of grammatical categories. This paper investigates how semantic knowledge could be involved in discovering these categories, thus confronting two competing hypotheses: are semantic categories innate, or are they developed in a piecemeal fashion? We tested for regular associations between basic semantic dimensions and the development of the founding categories of noun and verb. Six perceptually based semantic dimensions (Parisse and Poulain, 2010), shared by nouns and verbs but potentially distinctive, are coded in the productions of three children aged 1;06 to 2;06. Our results suggest that semantic dimensions do not offer an entry into the early differentiation of noun and verb categories.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 22 , Special Issue 1: First language acquisition of French grammar (from 10 months to 4 years old) , March 2012 , pp. 37 - 56
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

This work was supported by two grants from the Agence Nationale pour la Recherche, France (ANR COLAJE and ANR POLYCAT).

References

REFERENCES

Aksu-Koç, A. and Slobin, D. (1985). Acquisition of Turkish. In: Slobin, D. I. (ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition. Vol. 1: The data. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 839–878.Google Scholar
Bassano, D. (2000). Early development of nouns and verbs in French: Exploring the interface between lexicon and grammar. Journal of Child Language, 27: 521–559.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bates, E., Marchman, V., Thal, D., Fenson, L., Dale, P., Reznik, J., Reilly, J. and Hartung, J. (1994). Developmental and stylistic variation in the composition of early vocabulary. Journal of Child Language, 21.1: 85–123.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Black, M. and Chiat, S. (2003). Noun–verb dissociations: a multi-faceted phenomenon. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 16.2–3: 231–250.Google Scholar
Bloom, L. (1991). Language Development from Two to Three. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Braine, M. D. S. (1963). The ontogeny of English phrase structure: The first phrase. Language, 39: 1–14.Google Scholar
Casasola, M., Bhagwat, J. and Ferguson, K. (2006). Precursors to verb learning: infant's understanding of motion events. In: Hirsh-Pasek, K. and Golinkoff, R. M. (eds), Action Meets Word: How Children Learn Verbs. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 160–190.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of Language. London: Praeger.Google Scholar
Clark, E. (2001). Emergent categories in first language acquisition. In: Bowerman, M. and Levinson, S., (eds), Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 379–405.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, E. V. (1982) The young word-maker: A case study of innovation in the child's lexicon. In: Wanner, E. and Gleitman, L. R. (eds), Language Acquisition: The State of the Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 390–425.Google Scholar
Croft, William (2001). Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in a Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Croft, W. (2007). Exemplar semantics. Unpublished manuscript, available online at http://www.unm.edu/~wcroft/Papers/CSDL8-paper.pdfGoogle Scholar
Cysouw, M. (2010). Semantic maps as metrics on meaning, Linguistic Discovery, 8.1: 70–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gelman, S. A. and Gottfried, G. M. (1996). Children's causal explanations of animate and inanimate motion, Child Development, 67:1970–1987.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gentner, D. (1982). Why nouns are learned before verbs: Linguistic relativity versus natural partitioning. In: Kuczak, S. A.. (ed.), Language Development, vol. 2. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Gentner, D. (2006). Why verbs are hard to learn. In: Hirsch-Pasek, K. and Golinkoff, R. (eds), Action Meets Word: How Children Learn Verbs. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gleitman, L.R. (1990) The structural sources of verb meanings. Language Acquisition 1, 3–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, A. (1998). Patterns of experience in patterns of language, In: Tomasello, M. (ed.), The New Psychology of Language. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 203–219.Google Scholar
Goldberg, A. (2003). Constructions: A new theoretical approach to language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7.5: 219–224.Google Scholar
Goldberg, A. (2006). Constructions at Work. The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Golinkoff, R. M. and Hirsh-Pasek, K. (2008). How toddlers begin to learn verbs. Trends in Cognitive Science, 12: 397–403.Google Scholar
Golinkoff, R. M., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Mervis, C. B., Frawley, W. and Parillo, M. (1995). Lexical principles can be extended to the acquisition of verbs. In: Tomasello, M. and Merriman, W. (eds), Beyond Names for Things: Young Children's Acquisition of Verbs. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 185–222.Google Scholar
Haspelmath, M. (2007). Pre-established categories don't exist: consequences for language description and typology. Linguistic Typology, 11, 1: 119–132.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Macnamara, J. (1984). Names for Things: A Study in Human Learning. Cambridge, MA: Bradford.Google Scholar
Maratsos, M. P. (1976). The Use of Definite and Indefinite Reference in Young Children: An Experimental Study of Semantic Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Morgenstern, A. and Sekali, M. (2009). What can child language tell us about prepositions? A contrastive corpus-based study of cognitive and social-pragmatic factors. In: Zlatev, J., Johansson Falck, M., Lundmark, C. and Andrén, M. (eds), Studies in Language and Cognition, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 261–275.Google Scholar
Nelson, K. (1974). Concept, word, and sentence: Interrelations in acquisition and development. Psychological Review, 81:267–285.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ninio, A. (2006) Language and the Learning Curve: A New Theory of Syntactic Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Parisse, C. and Poulain, C. (2010). Shared semantic properties of nouns and verbs in French-speaking children before age two, VI Congrès Internacional d'Acquisicio del Llenguatge, Barcelona, Spain.Google Scholar
Payne, T. E. (1997). Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field Linguists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peters, A. (1983). The Units of Language Acquisition. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Piaget, J. (1962). Le langage et la pensée chez l'enfant, Neuchâtel, Paris: Delachaux et Niestlé.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. (1984). Language Learnability and Language Development, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. (1994). How could a child use verb syntax to learn verb semantics? Lingua, 92:377–410.Google Scholar
Pruden, S.M., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, R.M. and Hennon, E.A. (2006) The birth of words: ten-month-olds learn words through perceptual salience. Child Development, 77: 266–280.Google Scholar
Pulverman, R., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, R. M., Pruden, S. and Salkind, S. (2006). Conceptual foundations for verb learning: celebrating the event. In: Hirsh-Pasek, K. and Golinkoff, R. M. (eds), Action Meets Word: How Children Learn Verbs. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rakison, D. H. (2005). Developing knowledge of motion properties in infancy. Cognition, 96: 183–214.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Slater, A. (1989). Visual Memory and Perception in Early Infancy. In: Slater, A., and Bremner, G. (eds), Infant Development. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Striano, T., Tomasello, M., and Rochat, P. (2001). Social and object support for early symbolic play. Developmental Science, 4 (4): 442–455.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Talmy, L. (1985) Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in lexical forms. In: Shopen, T., (ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 57–149.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2000) Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition, 74: 209–253.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition, Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. and Bates, E. (eds) (2001). Language Development: The Essential Readings. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.Google Scholar
Veneziano, E. and Parisse, C. (2010). The acquisition of early verbs in French: Assessing the role of conversation and of child-directed input. First Language, 30, 3–4: 287–311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Veneziano, E., Parisse, C. and Delacour, A. (2010). The early comprehension of noun-verb distinction in French. An experimental method. International Conference on Infant Studies 2010, Baltimore, USA, Mars 2010.Google Scholar
Veneziano, E. and Sinclair, H. (2000). The changing status of ‘filler syllables’ on the way to grammatical morphemes. Journal of Child Language, 27 (3): 461–500.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed