 Ability to learn to pair novel constructional meaning with novel form
 Known nouns and nonsense verb arranged in non-
English word order
 Presented present tense and then past tense



NP1, NP2, nonsense V
The spot the king moopos; The spot the king moopoed
Video showing a spot appearing on the king’s nose

 51 kids, 5-7 years old
 Training: presented 5 novel verbs and 16 examples (3 minutes)
 BF: 5 verbs w/ low frequency (44422)
 HF: 5 verbs w/ high frequency (82222)
 Control: watched film with no sound

 Forced choice comprehension


Two video clips shown simultaneously; subjects point to the one described by the sentence
Six with novel pattern and verb, six with transitive pattern and verb

 Figure 4.1
 Control: no better than chance
 Balanced: significant improvement over control
 Skewed (HF): significant improvement over balanced
 Children can get novel abstract meaning from a novel pattern with novel verbs; they can extend that to new utterances with new novel verbs

 Implicit learning

“…high token frequency of a single general exemplar does indeed facilitate the acquisition of constructional meaning” (p. 82)

 Goldberg, Casenhiser, and Sethuraman (2004) had found similar results with adults
 Kidd, Lieven, and Tomasello (2005)
 4-year olds with complement-taking verbs
 I say her give the present to her mom.
 Children changed the main verb 25% of the time


70% of substitutions involved think
Evidence that kids’ generalizations about construction involve verbs that are frequent in those constructions


Could this fast mapping be evidence that they’re innate?

 Could subjects have been paying attention to the o suffix on the novel verbs?
 Use non o verbs
 Do children recognize the novel word order?
 Two scenes: appearance (SVO) and transitive (SOV)
 Results


Children learned the novel construction without the morphological cue (Fig. 4.3)
Children matched word orders with appropriate scenes
(Fig. 4.4)

 Strong correlation between frequency of token and the likelihood it will be considered a prototype
 Facilitates category learning
 Less variability / distortion = faster category learning


“Centered” condition – frequent, prototypical instances

“Representative” condition – fully representative samples

“The superiority of the centered condition over the representative condition suggests that an initial, lowvariance sample of the most frequently occurring members may allow the learner to get a ‘fix’ on what will account for most of the category members.”

 Martians and blicks
1 2
 Those who get high similarity tasks first do better with low similarity tasks later on

 High frequency and dot patterns
 24 college undergraduates tested to see if they could determine new variations in dot patterns over the frequently occurring pattern
 Skewed frequency group performed better than the balanced frequency group
 Figure 4.5

 Frequency and early use of one verb pattern should facilitate the learning of the semantics of that pattern
1) She put a finger on that.
2) He done boots on. (28 months)
X causes Y to move Z loc is associated with
Subj V Obj Obl path/loc
 Other constructions center around nouns, adjectives, complementizers, etc.
 Double is construction with thing

 High-frequency type of example acts as an anchor (a standard for comparison)
 Number anchoring in cognitive psychology
 Anchoring effects are stronger when the anchor is perceived to be relevant to the task

 Are they necessary? NO! Subjects in the balanced condition performed better than those in the control condition (also – natural language learning)
 Do high frequency morphological tokens lead to generalizations? Bybee (1995) says no – they become routines that are not analyzed and can’t be extended
( went , am )
 VP idioms ( kick the bucket ) are analyzed


Children stick with the forms they’ve heard with particular verbs (Ch. 3)
 Age-related?
 Children vs. adults – experience with language
 Learners may be simply making tentative generalizations
– after all, they’re just recognizing differences – there’s no actual production involved in the experiments