Edward Kako

The semantics of syntactic frames

Research in psychology and in linguistics has converged to suggest that the syntactic frames in which verbs appear carry meanings of their own, apart from the meaning of the verbs themselves. To date, however, a gap has existed between these two lines of research: Research in psychology has inferred the meanings of frames only indirectly; research in linguistics, while more precise about frame meanings, has depended largely upon intuition. The research reported in this paper attempts to bridge this gap by using experimental methods to ask speakers directly for judgements about what frames mean. In two experiments, subjects were presented with six frames. The content words of each frame were converted to nonsense (e.g., “The rom gorped the blickit to the dax” and “The grack mecked the zarg”). Subjects were asked to rate the likelihood that various semantic properties were true of the nonsense verb. Results support the notion that syntactic frames carry fairly specific meanings, even in the absence of a known verb.

Information Sources for Noun Learning

Why are some words easier to learn than others? And what enables the eventual learning of the more difficult words? These questions were addressed for nouns using a paradigm in which adults were exposed to naturalistic maternal input that was manipulated to simulate access to several different information sources, both alone and in combination: observation of the extralinguistic contexts in which the target word was used, the words that co-occurred with the target word, and the target words syntactic context. Words that were not accurately identified from observation alone were both abstract (e.g., music) and concrete (e.g., tail). Whether a noun could be learned from observation depended on whether it labeled a basic-level object category (BLOC). However, the difference between BLOC labels and non-BLOC labels was eliminated when observation was supplemented with linguistic context. Thus, although BLOC labels can be learned from observation alone, non-BLOC labels require richer linguistic context. These findings support a model of vocabulary growth in which an important role is played by changes in the information to which learners have access.

The promise of an ecological, evolutionary approach to culture and language

Dichotomous definitions of culture and language do not generate productive questions. Instead, more progress can be made by identifying components of each that other animals might plausibly possess. The evolutionary, ecological approach advocated by Rendell and Whitehead holds great promise for helping us to understand the conditions under which natural selection can favor similar capacities in differently organized brains.