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ERIC Number: EJ1474747
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025-Jun
Pages: 22
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0142-7237
EISSN: EISSN-1740-2344
Available Date: 0000-00-00
The Role of Input Cues in Acquiring Unaccusative and Unergative Verbs: Verb Learning Experiments with Mandarin-Speaking Toddlers
Ziqi Wang1,2; Xiaolu Yang2; Stella Christie2; Rushen Shi3
First Language, v45 n3 p260-281 2025
Children make use of various information in linguistic input to learn verbs, including syntactic distribution and semantic features. Within the intransitive verb class, unaccusative and unergative verbs differ in distribution with respect to word order as well as in semantic features such as telicity. Both the distributional and semantic information might act as cues for learning the two types of verbs. In this study, we investigate how Mandarin-speaking toddlers make use of these input cues to learn the unaccusative-unergative distinction. In verb learning experiments using the visual fixation procedure, 31-month-old toddlers were taught two novel verb items (V[subscript UA] and V[subscript UE]) and then tested on whether they were able to distinguish them. Results show that participants learned the difference between the two novel verbs based on the word-order cue and the telicity cue separately, but not simultaneously. Our findings provide evidence for toddlers' ability to employ distributional and semantic information in the input during verb learning, shedding light on the learning mechanisms of verb argument structure.
SAGE Publications. 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320. Tel: 800-818-7243; Tel: 805-499-9774; Fax: 800-583-2665; e-mail: journals@sagepub.com; Web site: https://sagepub.com
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: 1Beijing Institute of Technology and Tsinghua University, Beijing, China; 2Tsinghua University, Beijing, China; 3Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada