Casenhiser and Goldberg (2005)

1. Casenhiser and Goldberg (2005) • Ability to learn to pair novel constructional meaning with novel form • Known nouns and nonsense verb arranged in non- English word order • Presented present tense and then past tense • NP1, NP2, nonsense V • The spot the king moopos; The spot the king moopoed • Video showing a spot appearing on the king’s nose

2. 51 kids, 5-7 years old • Training: presented 5 novel verbs and 16 examples (3 minutes) • BF: 5 verbs w/ low frequency (44422) • HF: 5 verbs w/ high frequency (82222) • Control: watched film with no sound

3. Forced choice comprehension • Two video clips shown simultaneously; subjects point to the one described by the sentence • Six with novel pattern and verb, six with transitive pattern and verb

4. C and G Results • Figure 4.1 • Control: no better than chance • Balanced: significant improvement over control • Skewed (HF): significant improvement over balanced • Children can get novel abstract meaning from a novel pattern with novel verbs; they can extend that to new utterances with new novel verbs

5. Implicit learning • “…high token frequency of a single general exemplar does indeed facilitate the acquisition of constructional meaning” (p. 82)

6. Other Studies • Goldberg, Casenhiser, and Sethuraman (2004) had found similar results with adults • Kidd, Lieven, and Tomasello (2005) • 4-year olds with complement-taking verbs • I say her give the present to her mom. • Children changed the main verb 25% of the time • 70% of substitutions involved think • Evidence that kids’ generalizations about construction involve verbs that are frequent in those constructions

7. Fast Mapping and UG • Could this fast mapping be evidence that they’re innate?

8. Morphology and Word Order • Could subjects have been paying attention to the -o suffix on the novel verbs? • Use non -o verbs • Do children recognize the novel word order? • Two scenes: appearance (SVO) and transitive (SOV) • Results • Children learned the novel construction without the morphological cue (Fig. 4.3) • Children matched word orders with appropriate scenes (Fig. 4.4)

9. Skewed Frequency in Non-Linguistic Categorization • Strong correlation between frequency of token and the likelihood it will be considered a prototype • Facilitates category learning • Less variability / distortion = faster category learning

10. Elio and Anderson (1984) • “Centered” condition – frequent, prototypical instances • “Representative” condition – fully representative samples • “The superiority of the centered condition over the representative condition suggests that an initial, low-variance sample of the most frequently occurring members may allow the learner to get a ‘fix’ on what will account for most of the category members.”

11. Gentner, Loewenstein, and Hung (2002) • Martians and blicks 1 2 • Those who get high similarity tasks first do better with low similarity tasks later on

13. Goldberg and Casenhiser (forthcoming) • High frequency and dot patterns • 24 college undergraduates tested to see if they could determine new variations in dot patterns over the frequently occurring pattern • Skewed frequency group performed better than the balanced frequency group • Figure 4.5

14. What’s the point? • Frequency and early use of one verb pattern should facilitate the learning of the semantics of that pattern 1) She put a finger on that. 2) He done boots on. (28 months) X causes Y to move Zloc is associated with Subj V Obj Oblpath/loc • Other constructions center around nouns, adjectives, complementizers, etc. • Double is construction with thing

15. Cognitive Anchoring • High-frequency type of example acts as an anchor (a standard for comparison) • Number anchoring in cognitive psychology • Anchoring effects are stronger when the anchor is perceived to be relevant to the task

16. High Frequency Tokens • Are they necessary? NO! Subjects in the balanced condition performed better than those in the control condition (also – natural language learning) • Do high frequency morphological tokens lead to generalizations? Bybee (1995) says no – they become routines that are not analyzed and can’t be extended (went, am) • VP idioms (kick the bucket) are analyzed

17. Conservative Learning / Fast Mapping • Children stick with the forms they’ve heard with particular verbs (Ch. 3) • Age-related? • Children vs. adults – experience with language • Learners may be simply making tentative generalizations – after all, they’re just recognizing differences – there’s no actual production involved in the experiments