2018 Sat Poster 6761

Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Poster Session II, Metcalf Small | 3:15pm

Children’s acquisition of polysemy: by, of, and with in child English
N. Adricula

The acquisition of prepositions presents a difficult learning challenge for child language learners of English because they are highly polysemous. Prepositions occur with a range of spatial, concrete, and abstract meanings and encode various semantic roles (e.g. Sandra & Rice, 1995; Tyler & Evans, 2003; Rice, 2003). The frequency and distributional contexts in which prepositions occur may help provide important clues about abstract meanings (Gentner & Boroditsky, 2001; Kidd & Cameron- Faulkner, 2008). Prior research has shown that children first acquire the senses that are most frequent in the input for prepositions such as with (e.g. Kidd & Cameron-Faulkner, 2008) and their construal is affected by the semantics of co-occurring verbs (Kidd, 2003; Snedeker & Trueswell, 2003).

Compared to the role of input frequency and distributional context in children’s acquisition of the lexicon and morphosyntax (e.g. Theakston et al., 2004; Naigles & Hoff-Ginsberg, 1998), we know relatively little about children’s sensitivity to these factors in their acquisition of polysemy, with some notable exceptions (Rice, 2003; Kidd & Cameron-Faulkner, 2008; McKercher, 2001). Here we build on this prior work to investigate the role of frequency and syntactic co-occurrence patterns in the input on children’s production of by, of, and with.

Data were collected from the child Abe and his parents in the longitudinal Kuczaj corpus (Kuczaj, 1977) in CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000). Preposition senses were coded using a modified version of Rice’s (2003) categories for multiple prepositions’ senses. Their syntactic contexts were coded and compared between child and caregivers. Table 1 lists their relative frequencies for the three most frequent senses and syntactic contexts for each preposition. These senses consisted of primarily abstract uses, such as passive agent-by (e.g. he’ll get killed by the dragon 4;1.05), quantifier-of (e.g. I need two of them 2;8.01), etc. Spearman rank-order correlations between child and caregivers for sense frequencies were significant for of (p < .0001) and with (p < .0001) but not by (p > .05). Correlations for syntactic frames were also significant for of (p < .0001) and with (p < .05.) but not by (p > .05) (coefficients in Table 1).

The high correlations between Abe and his caregivers’ relative frequencies for of and with senses and their co-occurring syntactic contexts support prior findings (e.g. Kidd & Cameron-Faulkner, 2008) that these factors are influential in the acquisition of prepositional polysemy. Intriguingly, we don’t find similar correlations for the preposition by. Qualitative analyses of by uses in child and caregiver speech suggest that other cues may play a role here. For instance, Abe’s caregivers used spatial locative-by (e.g. put the camel by the car) more frequently (mean = .17) compared to Abe, specifically when telling him where to put things and where to sit. Compared to his caregivers, Abe’s use of instrumental-by occasionally overlapped with instrumental-with contexts (e.g. I think by tape we could fix it). Our findings suggest that, in addition to syntax, other cues such as interactional uses and non-prototypical uses of prepositions may provide insight on the acquisition of polysemy patterns.

References

Gentner, D., & Boroditsky, L. (2001). Individuation, relativity, and early word learning. Language acquisition and conceptual development, 3, 215-256.

Kidd, E., & Cameron-Faulkner, T. (2008). The acquisition of the multiple senses of with. Linguistics, 46(1), 33-61.

Kidd, Evan (2003). An investigation into children’s sentence processing: a developmental perspective. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, La Trobe University

Kuczaj II, S. A. (1977). The acquisition of regular and irregular past tense forms. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 16(5), 589-600.

MacWhinney, B. (2014). The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk, Volume II: The database. Psychology Press.

McKercher, David A. (2001). The polysemy of with in first language acquisition. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University.

Naigles, L. R., & Hoff-Ginsberg, E. (1998). Why are some verbs learned before other verbs? Effects of input frequency and structure on children’s early verb use. Journal of child language, 25(1), 95-120.

Rice, S. (2003). Growth of a lexical network: Nine English prepositions in acquisition. Cognitive approaches to lexical semantics, 243-280.

Snedeker, J., & Trueswell, J. (2003). Using prosody to avoid ambiguity: Effects of speaker awareness and referential context. Journal of Memory and language, 48(1), 103-130.

Sandra, D., & Rice, S. (1995). Network analyses of prepositional meaning: Mirroring whose mind— the linguist’s or the language user’s?. Cognitive Linguistics (includes Cognitive Linguistic Bibliography), 6(1), 89-130.

Theakston, A. L., Lieven, E. V., Pine, J. M., & Rowland, C. F. (2004). Semantic generality, input frequency and the acquisition of syntax. Journal of Child Language, 31(1), 61-99.

Tyler, A., & Evans, V. (2003). The semantics of English prepositions: Spatial scenes, embodied meaning, and cognition. Cambridge University Press