Structural Limits Verb Mapping-The Role Of Abstract Structure In Chinese Children’s Interpretations Of Verbs

The understanding of vocabulary, especially the verb, is the major focus of children’s language acquisition researches. A lot of linguistic experiments have been carried out about lexical acquisition. Studies of language acquisition under the framework of syntactic bootstrapping have demonstrated that syntactic structure guides young children’s interpretations during the verb acquisition. As is well known, Chinese is a language which allows pervasive ellipsis of noun arguments, especially object dropping in discourse, thus rendering argument structure not to be the only cue to verb interpretations, casting doubt concerning children’s use of syntax to make conjectures about the meanings of verbs.This study aims at investigating the role of argument structure of verbs in Chinese children’s verb understanding, which attempts to investigate the language-general and language-specific properties of the process of language learning.This study is divided into two parts. In the first experiment,55Mandarin speaking children aged from2;6to5;11were enrolled. They reacted to sentences with NVN and NV frames, including transitive verbs as well as intransitive verbs. The purpose of this part is to testify whether children can use the argument structure to interpret the meanings of transitive and intransitive verbs contained in both NVN and NV frames. Do the argument structures of the verb have the same role in transitive verbs as in intransitive verbs? Do the argument structures of the verb have different effects in the varied year-old children?In the second experiment,55Mandarin speaking children aged from2;5to5;11 reacted to sentences with novel verbs. These novel verbs were contained in sentences with NVN and NV frames. The aim of this test is to exam whether children can nevertheless, use the argument structure to guide the interpretation of novel verbs in different frames and investigate the age effects during the enencoding of the meaning of those somewhat weird verbs.Our findings reveals that younger Mandarin learners incline to interpret verb meaning depending on the number of overt NPs in sentences. From the experiment, it can be seen clearly that younger Mandarin learners incline to be frame compliant so as to limit the frames in which certain meaning of verbs can appear, while elder Mandarin learners incline to be verb compliant, and they rigidly follow the restrictions of the verb meaning.In a word, the syntactic frame in which a word appears plays an important role in the early interpretation of verbs, however, this importance diminishes gradually with age. It is reasonable to conclude that these phenomena can be attributed.to the integration between properties of the input frequency and the learning mechanism. Along with the increase of age, then children gradually solidify the meaning of verbs.