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cover next page > title: The Acquisition of the Lexicon author: Gleitman, Lila R. publisher: MIT Press isbn10 | asin: 0262571099 print isbn13: 9780262571098 ebook isbn13: 9780585026602 language: English subject Language acquisition, Vocabulary, Semantics. publication date: 1994 lcc: P118.A143 1994eb ddc: 401/.93 subject: Language acquisition, Vocabulary, Semantics. cover next page > If you like this book, buy it! < previous page cover-0 next page > The Acquisition of the Lexicon edited by Lila Gleitman and Barbara Landau A Bradford Book The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England < previous page cover-0 next page > If you like this book, buy it! < previous page cover-1 next page > Second printing, 1996 First MIT Press edition, 1994 © 1994 Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam, the Netherlands All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. Reprinted from Lingua: International Review of General Linguistics, Volume 92, Nos. 14, April 1994. The MIT Press has exclusive license to sell this English-language book edition throughout the world. Printed and bound in the United States of America. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The acquisition of the lexicon / edited by Lila Gleitman and Barbara Landau. 1st MIT Press ed. p. cm. "A Bradford book." Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-57109-9 1. Language acquisition. 2. Vocabulary. 3. Semantics. I. Gleitman, Lila R. II. Landau, Barbara, 1949 P118.A143 1994 401'.93dc20 94-28973 CIP < previous page cover-1 next page > If you like this book, buy it! < previous page cover-2 next page > Contents Preface (L. Gleitman and B. Landau) 1 Section 1: Nature of the mental lexicon E. Williams, Remarks on lexical knowledge 7 B. Levin and M. Rappaport Hovav, A preliminary analysis of causative verbs in English 35 Section 2: Discovering the word units A. Cutler, Segmentation problems, rhythmic solutions 81 M.H. Kelly and S. Martin, Domain-general abilities applied to domain- specific tasks: Sensitivity to probabilities in perception, cognition, and language 105 Section 3: Categorizing the world S. Carey, Does learning a language require the child to reconceptualize the world? 143 F.C. Keil, Explanation, association, and the acquisition of word meaning 169 Section 4: Categories, words, and language E.M. Markman, Constraints on word meaning in early language acquisition 199 S.R. Waxman, The development of an appreciation of specific linkages between linguistic and conceptual organization 229 < previous page cover-2 next page > If you like this book, buy it! < previous page page_vi next page > Page vi B. Landau,Where's what and what's where: The language of objectsin space 259 P. Bloom,Possible names: The role of syntax-semantics mappings in the acquisition of nominals 297 Section 5: The case of verbs C. Fisher, D.G. Hall, S. Rakowitz and L. Gleitman,When it is better to receive than to give: Syntactic and conceptual constraints on vocabulary growth 333 S. Pinker,How could a child use verb syntax to learn verb semantics? 377 J. Grimshaw,Lexical reconciliation 411 Section 6: Procedures for verb learning M.R. Brent,Surface cues and robust inference as a basis for the early acquisition of subcategorization frames 433 M. Steedman,Acquisition of verb categories 471 Index 481 < previous page page_vi next page > If you like this book, buy it! < previous page page_1 next page > Page 1 Preface For many years, the topic of lexical acquisition was a stepchild in linguistic inquiry. While the acquisition of syntax was acknowledged to be organized according to a set of deep and highly structured innate principles, word meanings were assumed to be acquired by a simple and particularistic associative procedure that mapped perceptual experience onto phonetic entities. We believe this stance was anomalous from the start, as had been pointed out eloquently by Plato and, in modern times, by Quine. Not all words are perceptually based; even those that are map quite abstractly from perceptual categories; and neither perception nor learning is 'simple'. During the past decade, it has become clear from linguistic inquiry that the lexicon is more highly structured than heretofore thought; moreover, that much of grammar turns on critical and universal links between syntactic and lexical-semantic phenomena. Hence the present volume. The papers grew out of a workshop held at the University of Pennsylvania. Its aim was to bring together psychologists, computer scientists, and linguists whose joint concern was the lexicon and its acquisition; these researchers have typically worked quite separately and on problems thought to be disparate. The volume is organized in six sections: 1. Nature of the mental lexicon: The two essays that open the collection are from linguists gleaning general perspectives on lexical learning from the linguistic facts themselves. The first, by Edwin Williams, argues from the real complexity and idiosyncratic nature of the mental lexicon (including lexical phrases) that innate linguistic and categorization principles are not enough, that real children require a learning theory more sophisticated than usually has been supposed. A detailed analysis of English causative alternation verbs by Levin and Hovav eloquently supports Williams on the complexity of lexical structure. 2.Discovering the word units: To acquire a vocabulary, the learner requires some procedures for segmenting the continuously varying sound wave into word-sized pieces. Cutler discusses this problem, presenting evidence that a bias toward rhythmic alternation serves as a powerful bootstrap for infants (and adults, whatever their specific language background) solving this problem. Kelly and Martin then show that, armed with such biases, learners < previous page page_1 next page > If you like this book, buy it! < previous page page_2 next page > Page 2 exploit multiple probabilistic cues to discover the word units: domain-general learning procedures can be used to discover many domain-specific facts about language. 3.Categorizing the world: The word meaning culled from children's interaction with the world ultimately depends on how they represent their observations. A first question is whether children's mental representations (categories, and the theories that bind them) are the same, no matter the age of the learner. In her article, Carey makes a strong case for a 'discontinuity' theory, in which the very basis of inference from observation onto meaning-identification changes over developmental time. Keil, in contrast, argues that the mentalities of children and adults hardly differ. For both, his view is that concept and word acquisition involves both the discovery of multiple probabilistic surface factors (reminiscent of Kelly and Martin) and some theory-driven generalizations. 4.Categories, words, and language: A further set of articles again documents how the child uses the evidence of observation to decide on a word's meaning. But these emphasize the role of linguistic principles as an additional determining factor. Thus Markman points out that the learner is biased toward a 'whole object' assumption a new word probably names the whole animal rather than one of its parts or properties. But then how could a child learn 'nose' or 'white'? She provides evidence for a linguistic principle ('mutual exclusivity') that leads children to avoid two labels for the same object. Waxman shows experimentally that such biases, even in the toddler, are specifically related to the characteristic semantic properties typical of lexical classes nouns name objects but adjectives name properties. Landau shows how the separation and respective structures of the 'what' and 'where' systems (as documented by neuropsychologists) are related, in learning, to the child's acquisition of object names vs. place expressions. All these articles are neutral concerning the direction of the causal links here: the extent to which the perceptual-conceptual facts determine lexical class assignment, or the other way round. Bloom takes a stronger view in discussing the acquisition of nominal subtypes (count vs. mass noun, noun phrase): He holds that very early in life children consider syntactic form class as relevant to determining a novel word's meaning. 5.The case of verbs: The papers mentioned thus far make a strong case that the form- meaning linkages that typify language design are exploited by children acquiring the vocabulary of their native tongue. Grimshaw (1981) and Pinker (1984) emphasized, on the basis of these linkages, that children could derive lexical class assignment from experience-based learning of the < previous page page_2 next page > If you like this book, buy it! < previous page page_3 next page > Page 3 word's meaning; Pinker showed further that such a procedure would be marvelously useful for the construction of phrase structure ('semantic bootstrapping'). Landau and Gleitman (1985) emphasized that learning might sometimes, even usually, be the other way round; specifically, that syntactic structure plays a necessary role in narrowing the search space for verb meanings ('syntactic bootstrapping'). The three articles in this section hotly debate how the semantics-syntax links (specifically, the relation between verb argument structures and subcategorization structures) are implicated in the learning process for verbs. Fisher, Hall, Rakowtiz, and Gleitman emphasize the role of syntax in narrowing the range of interpretations made available by experience; Pinker argues that logically the child must work from experience to determine the syntax in the first place; and Grimshaw stalwartly proposes a reconciliation of these two views. 6.Procedures for verb learning: The positions just described, even if correct, can suggest only some boundary conditions on a learning theory for verbs. Fisher et al., as just described, assert that some rudiments of syntax are necessary for learning the verb meanings. But as Pinker points out, the question then would be: How did the child acquire the syntax if not by exploiting the word meanings themselves? Brent, in the best tradition of computer science, offers a discovery procedure for verb subcategorization that uses string-local surface cues only, and does surprisingly well. The final article in the volume, from Steedman, was designed as a specific commentary on Brent's work. But this short article is much more general than that. It strikes a number of sane cautionary notes about current theories of verb learning, of which the most important is that real acquisition is bound to be a messy business, with syntactic, semantic, and prosodic cues recruited by the child more or less catch- as-catch-can. Steedman also points out, in what we find an appropriately laudatory comment, that it is only in the presence of explicit computational models such as Brent's that the bootstrapping theories can ever be developed and seriously evaluated. It is the hope of the editors that this compendium of topics and views on lexical learning will be of particular use to the linguists who constitute the Lingua audience, in two ways. First, we suppose it will be useful to see the kinds of methodological and substantive contributions that scientific psychology can make to the question of language learning and hence to the theory of language. Second as we have emphasized earlier because syntactic and lexical structure are so closely entwined, we expect that the various articles will be informative as to how these linkages enter into the learning procedure for vocabulary. < previous page page_3 next page > If you like this book, buy it! < previous page page_4 next page > Page 4 We thank Lingua for the opportunity to air these works in this Special Issue, and we particularly thank the Lingua Chief Editor. Teun Hoekstra, for this continuing aid and support of this project. We thank also the National Science Foundation which, through an STC grant to the University of Pennsylvania Institute for Research in Cognitive science, made the Workshop possible. In that regard, we are especially grateful to the staff of IRCS (Trisha Yanuzzi and Chris Sandy) and to Carol Miller, Kimberly Cassidy, and Sally Davis (graduate students in the Department of Psychology) who ran the Workshop with verve, efficiency, and considerable good humor. Finally, we thank Steven and Marcia Roth for a grant to Lila Gleitman which aided us in the preparation of the Volume. Philadelphia, June 1993 Lila Gleitman Barbara Landau < previous page page_4 next page > If you like this book, buy it! < previous page page_5 next page > Page 5 Section 1 Nature of the mental lexicon < previous page page_5 next page > If you like this book, buy it!
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