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- Title
Toddlers Default to Canonical Surface-to-Meaning Mapping When Learning Verbs.
- Authors
Dautriche, Isabelle; Cristia, Alejandrina; Brusini, Perrine; Yuan, Sylvia; Fisher, Cynthia; Christophe, Anne
- Abstract
Previous work has shown that toddlers readily encode each noun in the sentence as a distinct argument of the verb. However, languages allow multiple mappings between form and meaning that do not fit this canonical format. Two experiments examined French 28-month-olds' interpretation of right-dislocated sentences (nouni-verb, nouni) where the presence of clear, language-specific cues should block such a canonical mapping. Toddlers ( N = 96) interpreted novel verbs embedded in these sentences as transitive, disregarding prosodic cues to dislocation (Experiment 1) but correctly interpreted right-dislocated sentences containing well-known verbs (Experiment 2). These results suggest that toddlers can integrate multiple cues in ideal conditions, but default to canonical surface-to-meaning mapping when extracting structural information about novel verbs in semantically impoverished conditions.
- Subjects
TODDLERS; VERBS; NOUNS; SEMANTICS; CAUSATIVE (Linguistics); LANGUAGE acquisition; ANALYSIS of variance
- Publication
Child Development, 2014, Vol 85, Issue 3, p1168
- ISSN
0009-3920
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/cdev.12164