Semantics In Acquisition

This volume contains writings focusing on semantic phenomena and their interpretation in the analysis of the language of a learner. The variety of phenomena that are addressed is substantial: temporal aspect and tense, specificity, quantification, scope, finiteness, focus structure, and focus particles. These phenomena are investigated is many languages. The volume creates a theoretical as well as an empirical bridge between semantic research on the one hand and psycholinguistic acquisition studies on the other.

This volume presents the state of the art of recent research on the acquisition of semantics. Covering topics ranging from infants' initial acquisition of word meaning to the more sophisticated mapping between structure and meaning in the syntax-semantics interface, and the relation between logical content and inferences on language meaning (semantics and pragmatics), the papers in this volume introduce the reader to the variety of ways in which children come to realize that semantic content is encoded in word meaning (for example, in the event semantics of the verbal domain or the scope of logical operators), and at the level of the sentence, which requires the composition of semantic meaning. The authors represent some of the most established and promising researchers in this domain, demonstrating collective expertise in a range of methodologies and topics relevant to the acquisition of semantics. This volume will serve as a valuable resource for students and faculty, and junior and seasoned researchers alike.

This book is about how toddlers learn their first adjectives, such as, for example, red, big and tasty. Adjectives denote properties and enter child vocabularies later than words for objects (such as apple and tree) and actions (such as eat and run), probably due to lower frequencies in parental speech and greater conceptual complexity. Adjective acquisition has received relatively little attention in child language research. Furthermore, cross-linguistic studies of adjective learning are virtually non-existent. This book represents the first systematic analysis of how children learning typologically different languages acquire adjective form, function and meaning. The cross-linguistic comparisons undertaken in the book provide valuable insights into universal and language-specific aspects of language acquisition. For each of the languages studied in this volume, the development of adjective semantics is studied in tandem with the development of morphology by testing two hypotheses: (a) the acquisition trajectory in the domain of adjectival morphology is determined by the typological properties of the target language; (b) irrespective of the languages being acquired, adjective learning is facilitated by universal conceptual mechanisms such as comparison and contrast.

Many applications depend on the effective acquisition of semantic metadata, and this state-of-the-art volume provides extensive coverage of the field of semantics acquisition games (SAGs). SAGs are a part of the crowdsourcing approach family and the authors analyze their role as tools for acquisition of resource metadata and domain models. Three case studies of SAG-based semantics acquisition methods are shown, along with other existing SAGs: 1. the Little Search Game - a search query formulation game using negative search, serving for acquisition of lightweight semantics. 2. the PexAce - a card game acquiring annotations to images. 3. the CityLights - a SAG used for validation of music metadata. The authors also look at the SAGs from their design perspectives covering SAG design issues and existing patterns, including several novel patterns. For solving cold start problems, a “helper artifact” scheme is presented, and for dealing with malicious player behavior, a posteriori cheating detection scheme is given. The book also presents methods for assessing information about player expertise, which can be used to make SAGs more effective in terms of useful output.

Multiple interrogatives, questions with multiple wh-phrases (e.g. Who bought what?), have long presented analytical challenges for linguistic theory. This monograph presents a new theoretical and experimental study of this construction. The theoretical findings concern the interaction between superiority effects, subject-auxiliary inversion, and the distribution of pair-list and single-pair readings cross-linguistically. The author examines multiple interrogatives under sluicing (i.e. clausal ellipsis), presenting new arguments for the deletion analysis of sluicing. The author also reports the results of several experimental studies on how children acquire the language-specific properties of multiple interrogatives in English, Russian, and Malayalam. The results suggest a correlation between the acquisition of multiple interrogatives and the acquisition of contrastive focus, which has been independently motivated in the syntactic literature. The monograph will be of interest to linguists concerned with syntax, semantics, and language acquisition, as well as readers who are interested in a comprehensive theory of language in general.

This book presents theoretical and experimental analyses of the nature of early verbs. At around the age of two years old, children start to combine words and produce their first verbs. Verbal items appear later than nouns in a child’s speech and refer to the relational concepts in the world that are represented in syntax through the argument structure. The central set of data investigated here is based on the analysis of the features of first verbal productions in Italian. Since the appearance of verbs implies the mastery of a mapping procedure between syntactic positions and semantic roles, the syntactic regularities found for each lexical verb class suggest that the relation at the syntax-semantics interface is well-established early on. The non-adult-like sentences are those which involve the mastery of the scope-discourse semantic interface or higher functional syntactic categories. The analysis of the delay in the production and comprehension of some constructions here uncovers some general characteristics of language acquisition devices.

This book provides a snapshot of the field of language acquisition at the beginning of the 21st Century. It represents the multiplicity of approaches that characterize the field and provides a review of current topics and debates, as well as addressing some of the connections between sub-fields and possible future directions for research.

This introductory guide to language acquisition research is presented within the framework of Universal Grammar, a theory of the human faculty for language. The authors focus on two experimental techniques for assessing children's linguistic competence: the Elicited Production task, a production task, and the Truth Value Judgment task, a comprehension task. Their methodologies are designed to overcome the numerous obstacles to empirical investigation of children's language competence. They produce research results that are more reproducible and less likely to be dismissed as an artifact of improper experimental procedure. In the first section of the book, the authors examine the fundamental assumptions that guide research in this area; they present both a theory of linguistic competence and a model of language processing. In the following two sections, they discuss in detail their two experimental techniques.