Do simple syntactic heuristics to verb argument structure hold up? A test with spontaneous corpora.

CRISTIA, ALEJANDRINA; AUDISIO, CYNTHIA P.

Zürich

Congreso; Societas Linguistica Europaea 50th Annual Meeting; 2017

Universität Zürich

Do simple syntactic heuristics to verb argument structure hold up? A test with spontaneous corpora Work within the Syntactic Bootstrapping framework proposes that children could use syntactic heuristics to guess at verb meanings (Gleitman, 1990; Fisher et al., 1994; Naigles, 1996). For instance, English-learning two-year-olds interpret novel verbs as transitive when they occur in sentences with two noun phrases, and as intransitive when the verb co-occurs with only one (Yuan, Fisher, & Snedeker, 2012). Modeling work on naturalistic English corpora suggests that such a bias could be learned incrementally (Christodoulopoulos, Roth, & Fisher, 2013). Is such a heuristic viable in other languages? In this study we investigate whether the number of nouns co-occurring systematically relate to verb classes in the input to individuals learning Spanish, a pro-drop language with fairly flexible word order. Argentinean infants (N = 10 whose parents had > 16 years education; N= 10 whose parents had