| dc.description |
According to the semantic-criteria-based approach to the acquisition of verb argument structure presented in Pinker (1989), positive evidence from input does not constrain children's argument-structure use: Children are not conservative learners of argument structure. The research reported here finds that children are, however, lexically conservative in the domain of learning argument omissibility. Two studies-one an observational case study of a child in the latter part of the second year, the other an experimental study with 4-year-olds-were conducted. Both show a relation between the argument frames used in input and those used by the child subjects: Children strongly avoided omitting a direct object with verbs used only transitively in the caregiver's samples (Study 1) and in the experimental input (Study 2). When input evidence of omissibility was provided, however, direct objects were significantly more frequently omitted in both studies. The findings are compared with earlier findings in the acquisition literature. It is proposed that a lexically conservative learning mechanism is well suited to acquiring argument omissibility (c-selection), because the acquisition of semantic criteria on argument structures (Pinker (1989)) would not suffice for children to retreat from any overgeneralizations they might make in this domain. |
