Narasimhan Bhuvana, Gullberg Marianne
University of Colorado at Boulder.
Radboud University Nijmegen and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
J Child Lang. 2011 Jun;38(3):504-32. doi: 10.1017/S0305000910000164. Epub 2010 Jul 8.
We investigate how Tamil- and Dutch-speaking adults and four- to five-year-old children use caused posture verbs ('lay/stand a bottle on a table') to label placement events in which objects are oriented vertically or horizontally. Tamil caused posture verbs consist of morphemes that individually label the causal and result subevents (nikka veyyii 'make stand'; paDka veyyii 'make lie'), occurring in situational and discourse contexts where object orientation is at issue. Dutch caused posture verbs are less semantically transparent: they are monomorphemic (zetten 'set/stand'; leggen 'lay'), often occurring in contexts where factors other than object orientation determine use. Caused posture verbs occur rarely in Tamil input corpora; in Dutch input, they are used frequently. Elicited production data reveal that Tamil four-year-olds use infrequent placement verbs appropriately whereas Dutch children use high-frequency placement verbs inappropriately even at age five. Semantic transparency exerts a stronger influence than input frequency in constraining children's verb meaning acquisition.
我们研究了说泰米尔语和荷兰语的成年人以及4到5岁的儿童如何使用致使姿势动词（如“把瓶子放在桌子上”）来标记物体垂直或水平放置的事件。泰米尔语的致使姿势动词由分别标记因果和结果子事件的语素组成（nikka veyyii意为“使站立”；paDka veyyii意为“使躺下”），出现在物体方向成问题的情境和语篇语境中。荷兰语的致使姿势动词在语义上不那么透明：它们是单语素的（zetten意为“放置/站立”；leggen意为“放置”），经常出现在除物体方向之外的其他因素决定其用法的语境中。致使姿势动词在泰米尔语输入语料库中很少出现；在荷兰语输入中，它们被频繁使用。引出式产出数据表明，泰米尔语四岁儿童能恰当地使用不常用的放置动词，而荷兰儿童即使到五岁也会不恰当地使用高频放置动词。在限制儿童动词意义习得方面，语义透明度比输入频率的影响更强。
