Verb Use in Chinese Children: Extensibility of Instrument

Verb Use in Chinese Children: Extensibility of Instrument*1 Te-Hsin Wu Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei 10617, Taiwan tehsin.wu@gmail.com Abstract. The goal of this study is to investigate 5- and 7-year-old‟s (N = 48) willingness to extend a common verb to an action event incorporating an unusual instrument. Instrument specificity is defined as the number of instrument adult native speakers can identify within an experimental task setting. Six target verbs were chosen and grouped into two groups of verbs, Specified and Open, by their instrument specificity rated by native adult speakers. Half children received a prior familiarization to the names and functions of the unusual instruments in the experiment. All children heard one story for each verb and were asked to first paraphrase and then act out the action in the story. Results suggest that: Verbs with more specified instrument are harder to comprehend, but children‟s performance increases with age; furthermore, the performance of extension is not improved by a prior familiarization to their names and functions. Keywords: instrument specificity, lexical development, verb extension, verb acquisition. 1 Introduction According to Golinkoff et al. (1995), once children have learned the appropriate semantic elements specified in their language, they should also start to generalize verbs based on semantic elements rather than on the shape, or event appearance. Many efforts have been paid to find out the crucial semantic elements that influence children‟s extension of verbs. For example, Forbes & Farrar (1995) found that 3-year-olds failed to generalize the novel verbs to a changed agent whereas 10-year-olds had no problem with changed agents. For another, Behrend (1990) found that result changes made children (3-, 5- and 7-year-olds) less likely than manner changes to extend the novel verb. The role of instruments in verb acquisition was first examined by Behrend (1990). His findings were that instrument changes in a verb, comparing to action and result changes, was relatively insignificant to the subjects (3-, 5-year-olds and adults) when using a novel verb to label an original event that has been modified in one of its semantic components. His interpretation was that instrument is not a very salient verb concept comparing to action and result. However, Seston et al.(2009) argued that children do perceive the difference in instrument. In their study, when the stimulous for instrument is more specified in its usage, children found it easier to extend it to a familiar verb. Their explanation to the results was that children‟s understanding of verb extensions is positively correlated with a verb‟s semantic concreteness (i.e. imageability) and shape. Nevertheless, it should be noted that Seston et al.‟s study has the following limitations: (1) Limitation of production task. In their study, they only ask children to paraphrase the stories, and use these production responses to assess their comprehension of the verb extensions. However, since comprehension usually comes before  This paper is based on a M.A. thesis submitted to the Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Taiwan University. This study is …

Content truncated to 500 words