University of Sheffield.
J Child Lang. 2012 Jun;39(3):637-63. doi: 10.1017/S0305000911000213. Epub 2011 Sep 13.
Previous research has found that children who are acquiring argument-drop languages such as Turkish and Chinese make use of syntactic frames to extend familiar verb meanings (Göksun, Küntay & Naigles, 2008; Lee & Naigles, 2008). This article investigates whether two-year-olds learning Japanese, another argument-drop language, make use of argument number and case markings in learning novel verbs. Children watched videos of novel causative and non-causative actions via Intermodal Preferential Looking. The novel verbs were presented in transitive or intransitive frames; the NPs in the transitive frames appeared 'bare' or with case markers. Consistent with previous findings of Morphosyntactic Bootstrapping, children who heard the novel verbs in the transitive frame with case markers reliably assigned those verbs to the novel causative actions.
先前的研究发现，正在习得土耳其语和汉语等省略论元语言的儿童会利用句法框架来扩展熟悉动词的含义（Göksun、Küntay 和 Naigles，2008；Lee 和 Naigles，2008）。本文探讨了正在学习日语（另一种省略论元语言）的两岁儿童是否会利用论元数量和格标记来学习新动词。儿童通过跨通道优先注视观看新的使役和非使役动作的视频。新动词以及物或不及物框架呈现；及物框架中的名词以“裸”或带格标记的形式出现。与形态句法启动的先前发现一致，听到带格标记的及物框架中出现的新动词的儿童可靠地将这些动词与新的使役动作联系起来。
