The Role Of Verb Argument Structure In Verb Understanding Of Children 2-5 Years Old And Learned

The learning of verb is a major focus of Children's language acquisition research.Studies under the heading "syntactic bootstrapping" have demonstrated that syntax guides young children's interpretations during verb learning.Mandarin Chinese allows pervasive ellipsis of noun arguments (NPs) in discourse,which casts doubt concerning child learners' use of syntax in verb learning. Mandarin Chinese is a language in which syntactic structure is not the most reliable cue to a certain meaning.This study was to investigate the role of argument structure of verbs in Chinese children's verb understanding and acquisition.This study investigated whether Mandarin learning children would nonetheless extend verb meanings based on the number of NPs in sentences.This was also to prove Whether Chinese children will make use of the verb argument structure(the number of NPs) to learn new verbs.This research investigates language-general and language-specific properties of the acquisition of argument structure.This study was divided into three experiments,from the start the following three aspects.(1)In experiment 1,82 Mandarin-speaking two-and-three-and-four-and-five-year-olds enacted sentences with familiar verbs.The purpose of the experiment is to investigate whether Chinese children will use the argument structure of the verb to understand the meaning of the verb.Did the argument structure of the verb have the same role in transitive verbs and intransitive verbs? Did the argument structure of the verb have the different role in different years old children?(2)In experiment 2,77 Mandarin-speaking two-and-three-and-four-and-five-year-olds learned the meaning of 8 new verbs.The purpose of the experiment is to investigate whether Chinese children will use the argument structure of the verb to learn the meaning of new verbs.Did the argument structure of the verb have the different role in different years old children?(3)In experiment 3,79 Mandarin-speaking two-and-three-and-four-and-five-year-olds learned the meaning of 8 new verbs,then test their recognition of this verbs in day-1,day-2 and day-3.The purpose of this experiment was to study the learning and maintain of the new verbs' meaning.Did there is a laws of the memory of new words meaning.The experimental results and the comprehensive discussion of this study support the following conclusions:(1)The presence of an extra postverbal NP led the toddlers to extend causative meanings to intransitive verbs,and the absence of a postverbal NP led them to extend noncausative meanings to transitive verbs.The effects of adding or subtracting an NP were statistically indistinguishable.Thus, the number of NPs in a sentence appears to play a role in verb learning in Mandarin Chinese supporting the universalist approach.(2) Chinese children will make use of argument numbers of the verb in a sentence in accordance with the realistic scenarios to guess the meaning of the verb.Mandarin Chinese allows pervasive ellipsis of noun arguments(NPs),which can not rule out the use of the noun arguments to learn the meaning of new verbs.This language-specific properties will affect and weaken Chinese children's use of the verb argument structure as a cue to know the meaning of new verbs,especially the older children.These data support the conclusion that the acquisition of argument structure is influenced by both language-general mechanisms(e.g.uniqueness,entrenchment) and language- specific properties(e.g.prepositional ambiguity).(3)The form of Sentence(the number of NPs) provides a effective clue in the learning and memory the meaning of the new verbs.Verb argument structure influenced the learning of new verbs' meaning,also affected children's memories of new verbs' meaning.In the second and third days after learning,Chinese children think the verb presented in 1-NP have more transitivity meaning.