Discovering verb classes: traces in the input to socioeconomically diverse Argentinean children.

AUDISIO, CYNTHIA PAMELA; CRISTIA, ALEJANDRINA

Tartu

Congreso; 14th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Linguistic Diversity and Cognitive Linguistics.; 2017

University of Tartu, Estonian Cognitive Linguistics Association

DISCOVERING VERB CLASSES: TRACES IN THE INPUT TO SOCIOECONOMICALLY DIVERSE ARGENTINEAN CHILDREN Cynthia Pamela AudisioCentro Interdisciplinario de Investigaciones en Psicología Matemática y Experimental (CONICET)cpaudisio@gmail.comAlejandrina CristiaLaboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (CNRS) alecristia@gmail.com According to the Syntactic Bootstrapping hypothesis, children use syntactic frames to narrow down the meaning of verbs (Gleitman, 1990; Fisher et al., 1994). One such heuristic appears to be present from early on: English-learning two-year-olds interpret novel verbs in their input 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). Is that heuristic viable in other languages such as Spanish, a pro-drop language with fairly flexible word order? To answer this question, we measure whether a systematic relationship between the number of nouns and the verb type stands even after running a child-like coarse-grained analysis of the infant?s linguistic input. Argentinean infants (N = 10 whose parents had > 16 years education; N= 10 whose parents had