Where Linguistics Meets Psychology: Can Talmy's Categories of Motion Events Explain How Children Learn Verbs?

Abstract

This dissertation uses Talmy’s linguistic analysis to evaluate the Typological Prevalence Hypothesis – the idea that concepts that are consistently lexicalized across languages are easier to learn than less-consistently-lexicalized concepts, especially for young language learners (Gentner & Bowerman, 2009). We predicted that, for 2-year-olds, who have just begun verb acquisition, mapping a novel verb onto its referent should be easiest for categories that are consistently represented in the world’s verb systems (PATH of motion), followed by less consistently-represented concepts (MANNER of motion), and then concepts that are never represented (COLOR of an actor) (Research Question 1). We also evaluated whether this mapping pattern was predicted by age (Research Question 2) or individual differences in vocabulary levels (Research Question 3). Largely confirming our prediction, 2-year-olds were better at mapping verbs for PATH and MANNER than COLOR. Thus, at the early stage of verb acquisition, children are already equipped with basic knowledge of what verbs should encode. Later into development, 4-year-olds showed the language-specific verb-to-MANNER bias. Further, adults were most likely to associate a novel verb with MANNER, followed by PATH, and then COLOR, exactly mirroring the way the English verb system encodes motion events. Individual differences in language skills predicted the verb learning patterns in adults but not in children. Taken together, this dissertation provides an important step towards understanding how the semantic organization of language may relate to the process of verb acquisition.