Linguistics Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Linguistics, including details on human language, phonetics, syntax, phonology.

From semantics to syntax and back again: argument structure in the third year of life.

Fernandes KJ, Marcus GF, Di Nubila JA, Vouloumanos A

Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montréal, QC, H3A 1B1, Canada. keithf@nyu.edu

An essential part of the human capacity for language is the ability to link conceptual or semantic representations with syntactic representations. On the basis of data from spontaneous production, suggested that young children acquire such links on a verb-by-verb basis, with little in the way of a general understanding of linguistic argument structure. Here, we suggest that a receptive understanding of argument structure--including principles linking syntax and conceptual/semantic structure--appears earlier. In a forced-choice pointing task we have shown that toddlers in the third year of life can map a single scene (involving a novel causative action paired with a novel verb) onto two distinct syntactic frames (transitive and intransitive). This suggests that even before toddlers begin generalizing argument structure in their own speech, they have some representation of conceptual/semantic categories, syntactic categories, and a system that links the two.

Published 20 June 2006 in Cognition, 100(2): B10-20.
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