Mandarin-Speaking Children Can Use Function Words to Distinguish Nouns Versus Verbs

• In Event: Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Topic - Language, Communication

Abstract

One useful cue to the meaning of a new word is its form class. On one theory, form class determination is assisted by the syntactic structure of sentences in which a new word appears, a process called syntactic bootstrapping. In English, a novel word tends to be a noun if it follows an article (a/an/the), and a verb if it bears an inflected form (-ing). A critical question about the role that syntactic bootstrapping might play in distinguishing between nouns and verbs is whether it can apply cross-linguistically in languages like Mandarin that require neither determiners nor morphological inflections and often omits subjects and objects.

Using a word learning task, Imai et al. (2008) found that Mandarin-speaking 5-year-olds interpreted a novel word as either a noun or a verb depending on the syntactic structure surrounding it. However, on the verb-learning trials, the novel verb was not only preceded by a verb-marker, “zai4” (indicating on-going events), but also followed by a noun phrase (NP), making it impossible to know whether verb learning was due to their knowledge of the function of “zai4” or children’s understanding that an NP often follows a verb. Or even perhaps, successful verb learning required the co-occurrence of a verb-marker and a post-verbal NP. Thus, it is still unclear whether young Mandarin learners can rely on function words to interpret the meaning of new words as nouns versus verbs.

In this study, the participants were 3- and 5-year-old Chinese learners (n=24/age-group). This study used a noun-marker “de” (indicating possession) and a verb-marker “zai4”. An experiment contained eight word-learning trials (4 noun-marker trials and 4 verb-maker trials). Each trial consisted of a training phase and a testing phase. During the training phase, children saw a woman performing an unfamiliar action with an unfamiliar object in the center of the screen while the experimenter labeled the event with a novel words preceded by either a noun-marker or a verb-marker embedded in a minimal pair of sentences.

“Kan4 [Look]! Ayi2 [aunt] zai4 [verb-marker] X [novel word]”
“Kan4 [Look]! Ayi2 [aunt] de [noun-marker] Y [novel word]”

The sentence structure required children to rely on their syntactic knowledge to determine the referent of the novel word. At test, children saw both a same action/different object event (AS) and a different action/same object event (OS) side-by-side, and they were asked to find the target for the novel word (Table 1).

We calculated the correct response rate for noun- and verb- learning within each child. Both the 3- and 5-year-olds mapped nouns to OS events. However, the 3-year-olds failed to map verbs to AS events, suggesting that they did not use syntactic bootstrapping to find the referent of a verb. The ability to use form-class markers to distinguish between nouns and verbs was observed only in the 5-year-olds. Thus, Mandarin learners can use syntactic bootstrapping to distinguish nouns versus verbs at 5 years of age. This study supports the universality of syntactic bootstrapping.

Authors

• Weiyi Ma, University of Arkansas
  Presenting Author

• Peng Zhou, Tsinghua University
  Non-Presenting Author