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The role of input frequency and semantic transparency in the acquisition of verb meaning: evidence from placement verbs in Tamil and Dutch*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 July 2010

BHUVANA NARASIMHAN  and
MARIANNE GULLBERG
BHUVANA NARASIMHAN*
Affiliation:
University of Colorado at Boulder
MARIANNE GULLBERG*
Affiliation:
Radboud University Nijmegen and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
*
Address for correspondence: Bhuvana Narasimhan, Department of Linguistics, Hellems 290, 295 UCB, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0295, USA. tel: 303-492-8456; email: [email protected]
Marianne Gullberg, Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, PB Box 201, 221 00 Lund, Sweden. tel: +46-46-222 0389; email: [email protected]
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Abstract

We investigate how Tamil- and Dutch-speaking adults and four- to five-year-old children use caused posture verbs (‘lay/stand a bottle on a table’) to label placement events in which objects are oriented vertically or horizontally. Tamil caused posture verbs consist of morphemes that individually label the causal and result subevents (nikka veyyii ‘make stand’; paDka veyyii ‘make lie’), occurring in situational and discourse contexts where object orientation is at issue. Dutch caused posture verbs are less semantically transparent: they are monomorphemic (zetten ‘set/stand’; leggen ‘lay’), often occurring in contexts where factors other than object orientation determine use. Caused posture verbs occur rarely in Tamil input corpora; in Dutch input, they are used frequently. Elicited production data reveal that Tamil four-year-olds use infrequent placement verbs appropriately whereas Dutch children use high-frequency placement verbs inappropriately even at age five. Semantic transparency exerts a stronger influence than input frequency in constraining children's verb meaning acquisition.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , June 2011 , pp. 504 - 532
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

[*]

We gratefully acknowledge the cooperation of the teachers and students of the Ramakrishna Mission Tamil Medium School (Chennai, India) and Kindercentrum Dribbel (Molenhoek, the Netherlands). We are also grateful for funding from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. We wish to express our thanks to Judith Bindels, Pauline Chew, Bregje Esmeijer, Anke Jolink, Femke Uijtdewilligen, Arna Van Doorn, Shanmugam Mohan and R. Devi for help with the data collection and analysis, and Melissa Bowerman, Asifa Majid and Leah Roberts for comments on the design and analysis of the study. Our thanks also go to the reviewers of this paper who provided us with valuable suggestions. Any remaining errors are solely ours.

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