| This dissertation investigates the mapping between linguistic and conceptual event representations and the implications of this mapping for the acquisition of verbs labeling causative events. From infancy, we represent causative events as being composed of a set of subevents associated in a hierarchical structure that reflects their partonomic and taxonomic relationships to one another. Our linguistic representations of events are intimately tied to our conceptual representations, and languages reflect this complex internal structure in the grammar of the causative construction. The studies reported here offer a clearer picture of the range of meanings that language learners are willing to encode in single verbs associated with causative events and how the hypotheses they postulate about the meanings of novel verbs are constrained by conceptual and linguistic factors.; I present results from four preferential looking studies investigating the limits that 2-year-old children and adults place on their hypotheses about the meanings of novel verbs associated with causative events. Experiments 1&2 demonstrate that 2-year-old children have access to the same complex representations for causative events that adults do and that both groups can use verb-specific subcategorization information to identify and label the subparts of these events. Specifically, both groups mapped novel verbs in unaccusative intransitive syntactic frames onto the result of a causative event and novel verbs in unergative intransitive frames onto the agent's activity. For novel verbs presented in transitive frames, 2-year-olds demonstrated a bias to interpret them as labels for a causative event, whereas adults tended to map there onto the agent's activity. Experiments 3&4 reveal that as long as structural constraints on the mapping between verb syntax and semantics are satisfied, 2-year-olds can be flexible in the specificity of the semantic content they assign to their representation of a causative.; Taken together, these results provide support to the argument that children's early verb representations are abstract in nature. They suggest, moreover, that adults and 2-year-olds face word-learning situations with different resources and that they bring different strategies to the task of learning new words that stem from differences in their experience with the target language and the world. |
