Kristen Syrett

Meaning and Context in Children's Understanding of Gradable Adjectives

This paper explores what children and adults know about three specific ways that meaning and context interact: the interpretation of expressions whose extensions vary in different contexts (semantic context dependence); conditions on the felicitous use of expressions in a discourse context (presupposition accommodation) and informative uses of expressions in contexts in which they strictly speaking do not apply (imprecision). The empirical focus is the use of unmodified (positive form) gradable adjectives (GAs) in definite descriptions to distinguish between two objects that differ in the degree to which they possess the property named by the adjective. We show that by 3 years of age, children are sensitive to all three varieties of context– meaning interaction and that their knowledge of this relation with the definite description is appropriately guided by the semantic representations of the GA appearing in it. These findings suggest that children’s semantic representations of the GAs we investigated and the definite determiner the are adult-like and that they are aware of the consequences of these representations when relating meaning and context. Bolstered by adult participant responses, this work provides important experimental support for theoretical claims regarding the semantics of gradable predicates and the nature of different types of ‘interpretive variability’, specifically semantic context dependence v. pragmatic tolerance of imprecision.

Experimental Evidence for the Truth Conditional Contribution and Shifting Information Status of Appositives

15 sentence in which they appear. Here, we address this question head-on experimentally. We first investigate the information status of appositives and find that while nominal appositives (e.g. a classical violinist) and sentence-medial appositive relative clauses (e.g. who is a classical violinist) are largely not at issue, sentence-final appositive relative clauses can become at issue, as witnessed in their becoming the target of a direct rejection and 20 being associated with subsequent questions. We then investigate the truth conditional contribution of appositives to sentences in which they appear, and find that whenever an appositive is false, participants judge the entire sentence False. Reaction times complement truth value ratings to demonstrate that this decision is largely automatic. We discuss possible reasons for the difference among appositive types and sentential

How Can Syntax Support Number Word Acquisition

We expand upon a previous proposal by Bloom and Wynn (1997) that young children learn about the meaning of number words by tracking their occurrence in particular syntactic environments, in combination with the discourse context in which they are used. An analysis of the Childes database (MacWhinney, 2000) reveals that the environments studied by Bloom and Wynn (specifically, the partitive frame x of the y) do not on their own distinguish between number terms and those terms that are more generally quantity denoting. A set of novel word-learning experiments reveals that children (and adults) are aware of the semantic constraints of two of the syntactic environments targeted by Bloom and Wynn (the partitive frame and modification by very) but either rely upon or benefit from contextual information supporting learning where a number word can but need not be used in a sentence. We propose that children most likely combine their knowledge of counting principles (Gelman & Gallistel, 1978) with the discourse context to support the conclusion that a number word can appear in certain syntactic frames. Overall, the results indicate that recruiting syntax-semantics knowledge and assigning a number-word meaning to a new word is a delicate affair, even for adults, and suggest that there is a tight link between surface-level form, underlying constraints, and the discourse context in number word learning.

Shifting Standards: Children’s Understanding of Gradable Adjectives

Two studies demonstrate that children have knowledge of scalar distinctions between three sub-classes of gradable adjectives: relative (big, long), absolute with a maximal standard (full), and absolute with a minimal standard (spotted). Performance on these adjectives is compared with controls (shape, color, mood). Children appropriately shift the standard of comparison with context-dependent, relative gradable adjectives, and do not do so for the others. Reasons for non-adult-like performance with full are discussed. Evidence is presented that children know about the presuppositions of singular definite descriptions, suggesting that children as young as three have an accurate semantic representation of the.

30-Month-Olds Use the Distribution and Meaning of Adverbs to Interpret Novel Adjectives

Word learners are able to use the syntactic context of a word as one source of information to narrow down the space of possible meanings. We examine this bootstrapping process in the domain of adjectives, focusing on the acquisition of subcategories of Gradable Adjectives (GAs). We first show that robust patterns of adverbial modification in natural language sort GAs according to scalar structure: proportional modifiers (e.g., completely) tend to modify absolute maximum standard GAs (e.g., full), while intensifiers (e.g., very) tend to modify relative GAs (e.g., big). We then show in a word-learning experiment that 30-month-olds appear to be aware of such distributional differences and recruit them in word learning, assigning an interpretation to a novel adjective based on its modifier. We argue that children track both the range of adjectives modified by a given adverb and the range of adverbs modifying a given adjective, and use such surface-level information to classify new words according to possible pre-existing semantic representations.

Collectivity, Distributivity, and the Interpretation of Plural Numerical Expressions in Child and Adult Language

Sentences containing plural numerical expressions (e.g., two boys) can give rise to two interpretations (collective and distributive), arising from the fact that their representation admits of a part–whole structure. We present the results of a series of experiments designed to explore childrens understanding of this distinction and its implications for the acquisition of linguistic expressions with number words. We show that preschoolers access both interpretations, indicating that they have the requisite linguistic and conceptual machinery to generate the corresponding representations. Furthermore, they can shift their interpretation in response to structural and lexical manipulations. However, they are not fully adult-like: unlike adults, they are drawn to the distributive interpretation and are not yet fully aware of the lexical semantics of each and together, which should favor one or another interpretation. This research bridges a gap between a well-established body of work in cognitive psychology on the acquisition of number words and more recent work investigating childrens knowledge of the syntactic and semantic properties of sentences featuring numerical expressions.

Production and perception of listener-oriented clear speech in child language

In this paper, we ask whether children are sensitive to the needs of their interlocutor, and, if so, whether they - like adults - modify acoustic characteristics of their speech as part of a communicative goal. In a production task, preschoolers participated in a word learning task that favored the use of clear speech. Children produced vowels that were longer, more intense, more dispersed in the vowel space, and had a more expanded F0 range than normal speech. Two perception studies with adults showed that these acoustic differences were perceptible and were used to distinguish normal and clear speech styles. We conclude that preschoolers are sensitive to aspects of the speaker-hearer relationship calling upon them to modify their speech in ways that benefit their listener.

QR in Child Grammar: Evidence from Antecedent-Contained Deletion

We show that 4-year-olds assign the correct interpretation to antecedent-contained deletion (ACD) sentences because they have the correct representation of these structures. This representation involves Quantifier Raising (QR) of a Quantificational Noun Phrase (QNP) that must move out of the site of the verb phrase in which it is contained to resolve a case of verb phrase ellipsis. Furthermore, not only do children provide clear justifications for such sentences with ACD, but they treat ACD sentences differently from sentences with coordinated conjunction, a plausible alternative if they lacked QR. The findings have implications for the interpretation of experimental results in which children appear to lack this grammatical operation, and instead point to extragrammatical factors as the source of this pattern.

Slowly but Surely: Adverbs Support Verb Learning in 2-Year-Olds

To acquire the meanings of verbs, toddlers make use of the surrounding linguistic information. For example, 2-year-olds successfully acquire novel transitive verbs that appear in semantically rich frames containing content nouns (“The boy is gonna pilk a balloon”), but they have difficulty with pronominal frames (“He is gonna pilk it”) (Arunachalam & Waxman, 2010). We hypothesized that adverbs might facilitate toddlers’ verb learning in these sparse pronominal frames if their semantic content directed toddlers’ attention to aspects of the event that are relevant to the verb’s meaning (e.g., the manner of motion). As predicted, the semantic information from a specific manner-of-motion adverb (slowly) supported verb learning, but other adverbs lacking this semantic content (nicely, right now) did not. These results provide the first evidence that adverbs can facilitate verb learning in toddlers and highlight the interaction of syntactic and semantic information in word learning.

The representation and processing of measure phrases by four-year-olds

While many investigations of number in linguistic and conceptual development have focused attention on how and when number words are acquired (Carey, 2004; Fuson, 1988; Gelman & Gallistel, 1978; Wynn, 1990, 1992; inter alia), and, to a lesser extent, what children have to learn about the interaction of number words with other elements in the syntax and semantics (cf. Musolino, 2004, 2009), the occurrence of number words in expressions of measurement has been largely ignored. We have narrowed our focus to so-called Attributive MPs such as 4-foot rope and 3-pound strawberries, where the MP appears in attributive position, because by four years of age, children demonstrate a mastery of a number of key linguistic components for interpreting such MPs. First, they typically have solid counting skills and can map number words onto numerosities beyond the subitizing range. Second, they produce a wide range of NPs where a noun is modified by one or more adjectives. Finally, they both produce and comprehend noun-noun (NN) compounds (e.g., mouse house) phrases with similar surface structure.