Lexical Bootstrapping: The Role of Lexis and Semantics in Child Language Development 9783110308693, 9783110308648

Citation preview

Lexical Bootstrapping

Cognitive Linguistics Research 50

Editors Dirk Geeraerts John R. Taylor Honorary editors Rene´ Dirven Ronald W. Langacker

De Gruyter Mouton

Lexical Bootstrapping The Role of Lexis and Semantics in Child Language Development by Dagmar Bittner Nadja Ruhlig

De Gruyter Mouton

ISBN 978-3-11-030864-8 e-ISBN 978-3-11-030869-3 ISSN 1861-4132 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. 쑔 2013 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen 앝 Printed on acid-free paper 앪 Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Contents

Introduction: Emergence and applications of the Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nadja Ruhlig and Dagmar Bittner

1

Pre-language cognition, motion event semantics, and the transition from single words to first sentences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lorraine McCune and Ellen Herr-Israel

11

Bootstrapping and the acquisition of MandarinChinese: A natural semantic metalanguage Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adrian Tien

39

Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis and conventionality: a crosslinguistic study on verb acquisition by Chinese Mandarinand Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maria-Alice Parente, Aline Villavicencio, Maity Siqueira, Ping Chen and Lauren Tonietto

73

Lexical acquisition through acquisition order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Galit Weidman Sassoon

99

Lexicon-grammar continuity in Turkish children’s language growth . . . 123 Feyza N. Altınkamış Turkay The interrelation between lexical and grammatical abilities . . . . . . . . . . . 143 in early language acquisition Christina Kauschke Continuity of lexical, grammatical, phonetic and phonological development in German late talkers – A longitudinal study . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Claudia Schlesiger Function words and the bootstrapping of grammar in normally developing and impaired L1-acquisition of German . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Dagmar Bittner and Julia Siegmüller

vi Contents The role of the lexicon in the development of the language processor . . 217 Evan Kidd, Edith L. Bavin and Silke Brandt Grammar from the lexicon: Evidence from neural network simulations of language acquisition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 Steve R. Howell and Suzanna Becker List of contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268

Introduction: Emergence and applications of the Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis Nadja Ruhlig and Dagmar Bittner

The present volume adresses the controversies in language acquisition research surrounding the notion bootstrapping mechanisms. The scientific use of the term bootstrapping originates from computer science, where it refers to procedures by which small systems start (boot) more complex ones. In the field of language acquisition, bootstrapping is used to designate learning mechanisms which use information from one linguistic – or even non-linguistic – domain as cues for developmental progress in other domains or sometimes even the same domain: “Bootstrapping mechanisms are assumed to help the child find a starting point for acquiring the specific structural knowledge of the native language” (Höhle 2009: 374). The central claim here is that a systematic but hidden relationship exists between properties of the input and higher-level properties of the language system. Depending on which type of information is used to initiate the bootstrapping process, one distinguishes between, for example, prosodic, semantic, syntactic, conceptual, or pragmatic bootstrapping (see, e.g., Weissenborn and Höhle 2001). The papers in this volume discuss the Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis, i.e. the notion that lexis and semantics play a crucial role in language learning, and, specifically, in the development of grammar (Bates and Goodman 1997). The idea for this volume was born at a session on Lexical Bootstrapping in Language Acquisition held at the 2nd International Conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association (GCLA), Munich, October 2006. Included are papers on topics discussed at this session, as well as papers on topics especially invited to contribute to this publication. The volume pursues the main goal of the discussion at the Munich session, i.e. to evaluate the current evidence for a lexicalist theory of language and language learning from different theoretical perspectives. In doing so, it provides convergence of cognitive linguistics and generative approaches with respect to: (i)

interfaces and continuity across linguistic domains and between linguistic and domain-general domains;

2 Nadja Ruhlig and Dagmar Bittner (ii) the lexis–grammar interface and continuity; and (iii) the centrality of lexis and semantics therein. The developments which have taken place in linguistics over the last 25 years have led to a paradigm change in the sense of Kuhn’s (1962) “scientific revolutions”. The “syntactocentrism” that dominated linguistic research until this period has been shown to be a “scientific mistake” (Jackendoff 2003). Work done within cognitive and functionalist frameworks has contributed in a decisive manner to this paradigm change. The reintroduced focus on lexical semantics, reflected not only in the Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis, can be viewed in the context of “recontextualizing tendencies in 20th century linguistics” (Geeraerts 2003) in that cognitive linguistics has reinstated the social and psychological dimensions of language. The paradigm change is also present in the discussion on bootstrapping mechanisms in child language acquisition. Pinker (1984, 1987) was the first to discuss specific mechanisms by which the child can infer structural properties of the target language from input features and coined the term bootstrapping for such mechanisms. Interestingly, he started from word semantics and proposed semantic bootstrapping as the basic mechanism. Gleitman (1990), in contrast, argued that the central mechanism starts from syntactic features and, therefore, is syntactic bootstrapping. “Modular” approaches along the lines of Pinker and Gleitman share the assumption that bootstrapping is “part of an innate domain-specific inventory of capacities the child brings to the task of language learning” (Höhle 2009: 361). Other modular approaches consider bootstrapping mechanisms to be a filter which constrains more general kinds of learning mechanisms towards language learning. From this perspective, bootstrapping is an innate but not a language-specific mechanism (e.g. Saffran et al. 1999). In “non-modular” approaches the term bootstrapping occurred later and is restricted to referring to the Critical-Mass Hypothesis (Bates et al. 1994, Bates, Dale, and Thal 1995; Bates and Goodman 1997). In these approaches, language learning is assumed to be based on the same mechanisms as is learning in other cognitive domains. Categorization as the central mechanism becomes initiated (bootstrapped) by a critical mass of information providing sufficient material for generalization and the pressure for systematization and reorganization of the acquired knowledge. Bootstrapping in this approach can have the character of an emergence process (Elman, Bates, and Johnson 1996). The most discussed bootstrapping mechanism in the non-modular approaches is lexical bootstrapping. Parallelisms in the development of lexical and grammatical skills (see below) are considered as evidence for a

Introduction

3

non-modular structure of language knowledge (Bates and Goodman 1997). By assigning lexical learning a central role in bootstrapping processes, the language input and the socio-cultural context are given a more decisive role in the acquisition process. A link of sorts between the modular and the non-modular approaches to bootstrapping is Locke’s approach to language learning (e.g. Locke 1993, 1996). By assuming a dependence of language learning on innate biological phases of neuronal development, Locke proposed a four-stage model of language acquisition. After the first phase in which the child is assumed to segment the input on the basis of target intonation patterns and phonological units, the second stage is dedicated to word learning, including the acquisition of phrases. In this phase – as Locke (1994: 609) emphasizes – the child must acquire enough material in order to successfully complete the following two phases, in which s/he detects and automatizes the structural pattern of the target language. In this model the later language-learning processes (learning mechanisms) are instantiated by biological maturation and by a critical mass of lexical material. The explanatory limits that were reached in the earlier modular approaches to language learning seem to have paved the way for alternative approaches that assign a central role to lexical learning. Probably the first explicit mention of the term lexical bootstrapping was given by Dale et al. (2000), who claimed “vocabulary learning to be foundational for grammatical learning” and who proposed that this process should be “collectively labeled lexical bootstrapping” (Dale et al.: 621). Dionne et al. (2003) used lexical bootstrapping to designate the temporal steps from first words to word combinations, which in their view suggest a “direct contribution of early vocabulary to the onset of grammar” (Dionne et al.: 395). The most influential finding, however, had already been presented by Bates, Bretherton, and Snyder (1988). In their studies of the early language development of English-speaking children, they found a correlation between vocabulary size at the age of 20 months and the state of grammatical development at the age of 28 months. The resulting hypothesis was that the single best predictor of grammatical development at 28 months is the vocabulary size 8 months earlier. This correlation has been confirmed by later studies on the acquisition of English (Fenson et al. 1994), Italian (Caselli and Casadio 1995), Japanese (Ogura et al. 1993), Spanish (Jackson-Maldonado et al. 1993; Thal et al. 2000), Swedish (Berglund and Eriksson 2000), and German (Szagun et al. 2006). Recently, the correlation has also been shown to hold for bilinguals (Conboy and Thal 2006).

4 Nadja Ruhlig and Dagmar Bittner Consistent with O’Grady´s (1987) taxonomy of lexical items and developments in the composition of the lexicon, Bates et al. (1994) and Bates, Dale, and Thal (1995) distinguished three waves of reorganization of the lexicon, which lead from reference to predicate to grammar. The first wave of reorganization is marked by an increase in common nouns, with a peak around 100 words. The second wave is marked by an increase in predicates, and the third one by a sharp increase in closed-class words. In their seminal paper, which is today considered a kind of manifesto of the lexical bootstrapping approach, Bates and Goodman (1997) made the statement that grammar emerges from the lexicon. This claim arose from substantial evidence for a correlation between vocabulary growth and increasing syntactic complexity across languages and across such divergent groups of language learners as normally developing children, late talkers, children with brain lesions, and children with genetic syndromes. It has been shown that the correlation is clearly not an artefact of age (Bates and Goodman 1999). On the contrary, age seems to be a very poor predictor of lexical and grammatical abilities in children, at least between the ages of 16 and 30 months. In summarizing their results, Bates and Goodman (1997) proposed that grammar and lexicon are inseparable and are handled by the same processing and learning mechanisms. These mechanisms are claimed to have their foundations in the socio-semantic similarity of first (referentially used) words and multiword utterances. Both are form–meaning pairs with referential and propositional content. Words might be seen as constructions (Dąbrowska 2005) and vice versa. The crucial difference between early words and multiword utterances is that the former have no grammar, they are archilexemes (Zemb 1978), i.e. grammarless lexemes composed of form and concept only. Two questions have been discussed from the very beginning within the non-modular approaches to lexicon and grammar learning. The first question is whether it is exclusively the overall size of the lexicon that counts in the acquisition of grammar or whether there exist correlations between specific lexical knowledge and specific knowledge in grammar. Evidence for the latter comes from Marchman and Bates (1994), who found a powerful non-linear relationship between verb vocabulary and abilities in verb inflection, i.e. past tense marking. This finding confirms the initiating role of relational words in grammatical development observed by earlier studies (see McCune 2006). Later studies, however, specifically studies employing lexicon size as a clinical criterion for detecting children at risk and for distinguishing late talkers from children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI), focus nearly exclusively on the overall size of the lexicon. The sec-

Introduction

5

ond question which has been discussed is whether lexical bootstrapping is the only mechanism responsible for initiating grammatical development and whether lexical learning is bootstrapped by information from other domains. Recently, there have been several studies arguing for bi- or multidirectional bootstrapping processes (e.g. Dionne et al. 2003; McBrideChang et al. 2008). Across language acquisition theories there is agreement on the relevance of learning mechanisms which have the form of bootstrapping processes. However, there are, of course, unsolved problems with this approach. Firstly, there is the abovementioned debate on the availability and nature of bootstrapping mechanisms. Is this capacity innate and language specific (Pinker 1984, 1987), or is it a human-specific but general cognitive capacity that is also available for processes other than language learning? Or is it an even more general learning mechanism that is present in other species too (see Höhle 2009 for an overview)? Further problems concern questions like: At which point in language development does which kind of bootstrapping mechanism work? Are there interrelations between different processes and if so what do they look like? And, how valid are the currently claimed cues that are assumed to provide information for the child? The contributions to the present volume provide new insights in at least some of these questions: The study presented by Lorraine McCune and Ellen Herr-Israel examines the cognitive and linguistic development in very young children regarding bootstrapping processes from cognition to the lexicon and within the lexicon. The authors explore how single word use for motion events (e.g. particles such as up and down) develops into the use of light verbs such as put or drop, which initially are only used in restricted contexts but later are used in a growing number of contexts. The paper by Adrian Tien investigates acquisition of Mandarin Chinese from the point of view of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach and examines how the lexical bootstrapping account fits in with this theory. It is assumed that the children’s semantic space includes a kind of semantic preconcepts which are innate and therefore universal. From the perspective of this approach, Tien argues, semantic primes facilitate lexical-semantic and semantic-syntactic bootstrapping in children and therefore could broaden the lexical bootstrapping hypothesis. Maria-Alice Parente, Aline Villavicencio, Maity Siqueira, Ping Chen, Lauren Tonietto, Karine Duvignau and Bruno Gaume discuss homotypic bootstrapping mechanisms within the lexicon. In particular their study focuses on the acquisition of lexical-semantic organization and contributes to

6 Nadja Ruhlig and Dagmar Bittner open questions about specific intralexical development by comparing steps in the acquisition of conventional meanings of verbs in Mandarin Chineseand Brazilian Portuguese-learning children. Galit Weidman Sassoon also addresses aspects of lexical-semantic development within the lexicon. She proposes a specific bootstrapping mechanism, the Learning Bias, and discusses the acquisition of simple and complex semantic concepts in terms of this mechanism, arguing that syntactic knowledge is not a pre requisite for the acquisition of more complex concepts. Feyza N. Turkay investigates the development of lexical and syntactic abilities in Turkish-learning children. Since Turkish is an agglutinating language, the patterns in development are different from those in, for example, languages with synthetic inflection. The evaluation of verb morphology is crucial when examining syntactic abilities in this kind of language. Turkay argues that although there seem to be different pictures in different languages, the Turkish data support the Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis if the parameters are appropriately adjusted. Christina Kauschke presents two studies on typically and atypically developing children. In a longitudinal study lexical and grammatical abilities of children in their 3rd year of life were observed. The results contribute to the Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis, showing that homo- and heterotypic continuity in lexical and between lexical and grammatical abilities can also be found in atypically developing children. The chapter by Claudia Schlesiger also deals with skills in late talkers. As late talkers are at risk for Specific Language Impairment and often show deficits in grammar and phonology, Schlesiger’s study examines both areas. The skills of the late talkers are analysed with regard to heterotypic continuity in (1) expressive lexicon and grammar, (2) receptive lexicon and receptive grammar as well as productive grammar, and (3) expressive phonology and productive grammar. The results show that there are other interdependencies than just those between productive lexicon and grammar as proposed by the Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis, and an exclusively lexical influence on developing grammar does not hold, at least for late talkers. Dagmar Bittner and Julia Siegmüller investigate correlations in the emergence of function words and the size of the function word domain with the acquisition of finite verbs and finite utterance structure in the acquisition of German. By comparing two normally developing children with one SLI child, they find a dependence of the acquisition of finite structures and utterance complexity on the acquisition of function words, specifically modal and auxiliary verbs.

Introduction

7

The chapter by Evan Kidd, Edith L. Bavin and Silke Brandt deals with the influence of the lexicon on speech processing in young children. Kidd, Bavin and Brandt focus on past tense morphology and the role of verbs in syntactic processing by reviewing findings of different studies. The analysed data reveal substantial interactions between the lexicon and grammar, in accordance with the Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis, even in syntactic processing; they therefore go beyond earlier findings that show a lexical influence in later skills regarding the mean length of utterance (MLU) in young children. Instead of suggesting that language acquisition is a bottomup process, Kidd, Bavin and Brandt argue for an increasing integration of language acquisition and language processing research in order to include findings from the latter in the overall picture of acquisition processes. Steve R. Howell and Suzanna Becker evaluate the Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis in two studies in which neural network simulations were conducted. The results show strong correlations between early lexical and later grammatical abilities as proposed by the Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis. The network model shows that this holds for lexical production and grammatical comprehension. It is argued that the discussed bootstrapping account could be expanded to include receptive modality (see also Schlesiger) and that bidirectional bootstrapping should be investigated more closely. In sum, the papers provide new empirical evidence from different areas of language acquisition as well as from artificial modeling of the language acquisition process which are worth to further determine the relevance, role and place of lexical bootstrapping in the acquisition process and of how the Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis fits in with various theories of language acquisition. Acknowledgement The research of the editors of this book is supported by funding from the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), grant number 01UG0711. References Bates, Elizabeth, Inge Bretherton and Lynn Snyder 1988 From first words to grammar: Individual differences and dissociable mechanisms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

8 Nadja Ruhlig and Dagmar Bittner Bates, Elizabeth, Virginia A. Marchman, Donna J. Thal, Larry Fenson, Philip S. Dale, Stephen J. Reznick, Judy S. Reilly and Jeff Hartung 1994 Developmental and stylistic variation in the composition of early vocabulary. Journal of Child Language 21(1): 85–124. Bates, Elizabeth, Philip S. Dale and Donna J. Thal 1995 Individual differences and their implications for language development. In: Paul Fletcher and Brian MacWhinney (eds.), Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics: Volume 2: The Handbook of Child Language, 96–151. Oxford: Blackwell. Bates, Elizabeth and Judith C. Goodman 1997 On the inseparability of grammar and the lexicon: Evidence from acquisition, aphasia and real-time processing. Language and Cognitive Processes 12(5/6): 507–584. Bates, Elizabeth and Judith C. Goodman 1999 On the emergence of grammar from the lexicon. In: Brian MacWhinney (ed.), The emergence of language, 29–79. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Berglund, Eva and Mårten Eriksson 2000 Communicative development in Swedish children 16–28 months old. The Swedish Early Communicative Development Inventory: Words and sentences. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 41(2): 133–144. Caselli, Maria C. and Paola Casadio 1995 Il primo vocabolario del bambino: Guida all’uso del questionario MacArthur per la valutazione della comunicazione e del linguaggio nei primi anni di vita. [The child's first vocabulary: User's guide to MacArthur's questionary for the evaluation of communication and language in the first years of life.] Milan: Franco Angeli. Conboy, Barbara T. and Donna J. Thal 2006 Ties between the lexicon and grammar: Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of bilingual toddlers. Child Development 77(3): 712– 735. Dąbrowska, Ewa 2005 Words as constructions. In: Vyvyan Evans and Stéphanie S. Pourcel (eds.), New directions in cognitive linguistics, 201–224. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Dale, Philip S., Ginette Dionne, Thalia C. Eley and Robert Plomin 2000 Lexical and grammatical development: A behavioural genetic perspective. Journal of Child Language 27(3): 619–642. Dionne, Ginette, Philip S. Dale, Michel Boivin and Robert Plomin 2003 Genetic evidence for bidirectional effects of early lexical and grammatical development. Child Development 74(2): 394–412. Elman, Jeffrey L., Elizabeth A. Bates and Mark H. Johnson 1996 Rethinking innateness: A connectionist perspective on development. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Introduction

9

Fenson, Larry, Philip S. Dale, Stephen J. Reznick, Elizabeth Bates, Donna J. Thal and Stephen Pethick 1994 Variability in early communicative development. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 59/5. Geeraerts, Dirk 2003 Cultural models of linguistic standardization. In: Rene Dirven and Martin Pütz (eds.), Cognitive models in language and thought. Ideologies, metaphors, and meanings, 25–68. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Gleitman, Lila R. 1990 The structural sources of verb meanings. Language Acquisition 1: 3–55. Höhle, Barbara 2009 Bootstrapping mechanisms in first language acquisition. Linguistics 47/2: 359–382. Jackendoff, Ray 2003 Précis of foundations of language: Brain, meaning, grammar, evolution. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26: 651–707. Jackson-Maldonado, Donna, Donna J. Thal, Virginia A. Marchman, Elizabeth E. Bates and Vera F. Gutierrez-Clellen 1993 Early lexical development in Spanish-speaking infants and toddlers. Journal of Child Language 20(3): 523–549. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962/1970 The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Locke, John L. 1993 The child’s path to spoken language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Locke, John L. 1994 Gradual emergence of developmental language disorders. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 37: 608–616. Locke, John L. 1996 Why do infants begin to talk? Language as an unintended consequence. Journal of Child Language 23: 252–268. Marchman, Virginia and Elizabeth Bates 1994 Continuity in lexical and morphological development: A test of the critcal mass hypothesis. Journal of Child Language 21: 331–366. McBride-Chang, Catherine, Twila Tardif, Jeung-Ryeul Cho, Hua Shu, Paul Fletcher, Stephanie F. Stokes, Anira Wong and Kawai Leung 2008 What’s in a word? Morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge in three languages. Applied Psycholinguistics 29(3): 437–462. McCune, Lorraine 2006 Dynamic event words: From common cognition to varied linguistic expression. First Language 26(2): 233–255.

10 Nadja Ruhlig and Dagmar Bittner O’Grady, William D. 1987 Principles of grammar and learning. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Ogura, Tamiko, Yukie Yamashita, Toshiki Murase and Philip S. Dale 1993 Some findings from the Japanese Early Communicative Development Inventory. Paper presented at the 6th International Confe-rence for Child Language, Trieste, Italy. Pinker, Steven 1984 Language learnability and language development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pinker, Steven 1987 The bootstrapping problem in language acquisition. In: Brian MacWhinney (ed.), Mechanisms of language acquisition, 399–441. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Saffran, Jenny R., Elizabeth K. Johnson, Richard N. Aslin and Elissa L. Newport 1999 Statistical learning of tone sequences by human infants and adults. Cognition 70: 27–52. Szagun, Gisela, Claudia Steinbrick, Melanie Franik and Barbara Stumper 2006 Development of vocabulary and grammar in young Germanspeaking children assessed with a German language development inventory. First Language 26(3): 259–280. Thal, Donna J., Donna Jackson-Maldonado and Dora Acosta 2000 Validity of a parent report measure of vocabulary and grammar for Spanish-speaking toddlers. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 43: 1087–1100. Weissenborn, Jürgen and Barbara Höhle (eds.) 2001 Approaches to bootstrapping: Phonological, lexical, syntactic, and neurophysiological aspects of early language acquisition. Volume I and II. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Zemb, Jean-Marie 1978 Vergleichende Grammatik Französisch Deutsch: Comparaison de deux systèmes. Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut.

Pre-language cognition, motion event semantics, and the transition from single words to first sentences Lorraine McCune and Ellen Herr-Israel Children begin single word use after entry into stage 6 of sensorimotor development and the beginning of representational play (McCune 2008; Piaget 1954), a significant fact because this indicates a bodily and emerging mental understanding of the movements of the children themselves and other objects in space and time. This “embodied cognition” (Barsalou 2005) opens children to learning single words that apply to movement and change over space and time. Talmy’s (1983) motion event semantics, in particular his analysis of “path” meaning, further allows linkage of children’s earliest single words associated with dynamic events to later linguistic development. Dynamic event words express basic space/time meanings in relation to motion events. In English, verb satellites such as : up, down, here, there, out encode meanings related to reversible aspects of temporal and spatial event sequences which will later be syntactically encoded. In other languages these same meanings are expressed as single words of various part-of-speech status. The chapter documents this early congruence of space-time expression, a more general foundation for the varieties of spatial expression seen across adult languages, and for the beginning of word combinations with verbs.

1. Introduction Lexical bootstrapping is here considered as encompassing (1) cognitive bootstrapping into the single word period, promoting words referencing aspects of time, space and motion, and (2) use of this foundational lexicon as a bootstrap to mature verb use. The cognitive key to understanding this process is recognizing that children’s single words include, in addition to naming words so well-attested in the literature, a group of words that refer to dynamic, changing aspects of events, dynamic event words that rely on sensorimotor intelligence (Piaget 1954) and prefigure some verb functions. The linguistic key is recognizing the utility of Talmy’s (e.g., 1975, 2000) motion event perspective, in particular the salience of path and figure, as providing an analytic bridge for child and linguist from single words to first sentences with verbs. In English most dynamic event words initially termed “function forms” (Bloom 1973), and later “relational words” (Bloom and Lahey 1978; McCune-

12 Lorraine McCune and Ellen Herr-Israel Nicolich 1981) are particles, (up, out) or “baby words” (uhoh, allgone). These words do not relate on a one-to-one basis to later specific verbs, but demonstrate foundational knowledge of path and figure/ground relationships that promotes the subsequent development of verbs. In other languages, where verbs are the typical means of encoding the dynamic event meanings first studied in English, verbs expressing these meanings occur as single words, while the broader range of verbs await the development of multiword utterances. A great deal of study is devoted to part-of-speech comparisons of children’s early lexicons across languages. Adult part-ofspeech category may not be the critical feature in children’s early lexical development. The tendency to include verbs in single word speech in certain languages is probably a direct result of the fact that dynamic event meanings children are motivated to express are encoded by verbs in those languages. In the following sections we first define dynamic event words in relation to cognitive development at the transition to language, then present Talmy’s motion event approach to semantic analysis of sentences and categories of dynamic event words as these have been observed across languages. Finally discuss the relationship of dynamic event meanings expressed in single words to verbs meanings expressed in early sentences, and provide illustrative data from five children. 2. Cognitive basis of dynamic event words Children begin single-word use after entry into stage 6 of sensorimotor development (McCune 2006, 2008; Piaget 1954), a significant fact because this cognitive level indicates a bodily and emerging mental understanding of the movements of the children themselves and other objects in space and time. This “embodied cognition” (Barsalou 2005) opens children to learning single words that apply to movement and change over space and time. Verbs by their nature include a sense of temporal continuity, as do non-verb single dynamic event words. A child, who consumes a cookie, then says more, conveys both a reflection on the recent presence of the cookie and a prediction that the appearance of another cookie is possible. Similarly, a child with raised arms who says up predicts a temporal and spatial shift of his or her body into the arms of an adult, and is likely to use the same word in other circumstances regarding potential vertical motion. This temporal extension of lexical reference, as well as the movements implied prefigure verb use.

Transition from single words to first sentences

13

Bloom (1973) and Sinclair (1970) were the first to emphasize infants’ single words that referred not to objects themselves, but across objects, as expressing consistent relational meaning regardless of the objects involved, although Werner and Kaplan (1963) had earlier established the need for differentiation of meaning between entities and activities as a basis for combining words. These words expressed meanings such as recurrence (e.g., more), disappearance (e.g., gone), or denial (e.g., no). McCuneNicolich (1981) analyzed the basis of these kinds of words in known aspects of sensorimotor cognition (causality, space, time, objects) recognizing their basis in potentially reversible aspects of motion in space and time. Tomasello (1992, 2003) included non-verb dynamic event words as “first verbs” and specified some early dynamic meanings that might provide building blocks for more general verb knowledge. Words such as more and up, along with additional dynamic event words draw on a cognitive background established during sensorimotor development and consolidated with the onset of mental representation. Typically in modern cognitive science the term representation is taken to mean some form of neurologically based information. In contrast, mental representation as used here and elsewhere (e.g., Werner and Kaplan 1963; Haith 1998) refers to a state of consciousness that allows contemplation of the past, future, and counterfactual, a distinct form of consciousness recognized by Sartre as the “imaginal consciousness” (1948/1966: 12). All aspects of cognition have a basis in neurological activity of the brain, but a cognitive awareness limited to the present (perceptual consciousness) can be distinguished from cognition applicable to past and future as well as the present (conscious mental representation). Because of the capacity for mental representation, a child who has eaten a cookie can imagine that another might be given to replace it. Children’s perceptual development begins at birth, research has demonstrated changes in the ability to interpret spatial events over time (e.g., Quinn 2003). The capacity to process absent events requiring mental representation has a later developmental trajectory (e.g., Hakke and Somerville 1985; Piaget and Inhelder 1969). Bowerman (1989) questioned the salience of prior cognitive development for learning the meanings of spatial terms because across languages space is carved up across various lexical items in various ways. Consequently spatial concepts could not be learned pre-linguistically in a universal manner by children in various language communities and then simply “attached” to the salient words in their language. Our proposal is not in conflict with Bowerman’s conclusion. Children, in our view, are learning early about non-conceptual aspects of space and time. That is, a recognition

14 Lorraine McCune and Ellen Herr-Israel of potential reversibility of some temporal events, a sense of vertical movement, and movement toward or away from the self, as these occur over brief moments of time. As they become cognitively ready for more exact conceptual development, that conceptual development is shaped by the resources of the ambient language, yielding the varied organization of spatial terms first identified by Bowerman (1989). Children develop a perceptual understanding of space gradually over the course of their first year of life, before they are capable of mental representation. Quinn (2003) found that by 3 to 4 months of age infants reacted with a novelty preference to visual displays where an object was depicted as above versus below a horizontal line, as long as object identity was constant across trials. By 7 months infants were able to overcome this limitation, reliably distinguishing above versus below even when the object depicted varied (dot, dollar sign, plus sign, etc.), showing attention to spatial variation regardless of object. At this same age, but not before, infants also distinguished the spatial relation “between” where an object was depicted between two horizontal bars, demonstrating a novelty preference to objects depicted as above or below the two horizontal bars. However, not until 9 to 10 months of age did infants show the more robust processing of “between” when object identity was varied. Infants’ understanding of space develops gradualloy over the first year of life, based on experience and neurological development. It is of interest that between 4 and 7 months infants have gained experience handling and mouthing objects, providing opportunities for more complete experience of their spatial relationships than those available to 3month-olds. By 9 to 10 months in addition to greater experience in manipulation, most infants are mobile, leading to extensive experience of spatial relationships between themselves, landmarks, and various objects and people. Their generalization of spatial information across varied objects at 9 to 10 months indicates a beginning differentiation of spatial and object aspects of their world, and the relationships between them. In the Quinn experiments children were first habituated to specific spatial relationships, then shown to dis-habituate to a novel spatial relationship. This spatial knowledge is, at first, limited to simple controlled situations, but contributes to the ability to solve real-life problems, such as locating a toy that has rolled out of sight, a developmental skill also confirmed in experimental studies (e.g., Hakke and Somerville 1985). Hakke and Somerville (1985) investigated children’s ability to follow a sequence of events in which the experimenter enclosed a small object in her hand, then passed her hand under two screens in sequence. The experimenter

Transition from single words to first sentences

15

left the object under one screen or the other, showing the child her open hand (holding the object or empty) after passing it under each screen. If the child has the cognitive ability to follow this sequence of motion events, inferring the release of the object from the sight of the empty hand, and recall that sequence to mind, he or she will readily locate the object under the last screen visited before the hand was shown empty. Nine and 12-month-olds were capable of finding the object, but did not lift the correct screen immediately at greater than chance levels, so they knew the object must be there somewhere, but were not coordinating space and time or recalling the sequence of movements. By 15 months children were beginning to make appropriate inferences regarding the sequential trajectory of the “invisible” object and by 18 months two thirds of the children showed motion event understanding by going immediately to the correct location of the object. This success suggests the children were able to remember and use a sequence of events that they had not directly witnessed, an aspect of dawning mental representation. The gradual nature of this development is shown by the changes with age. The nine- and 12month-olds seemed able to infer that the object must still be in the environment, but did not relate the trajectory of the hand and whether it still held the object, to an immediate solution of the problem. This developing skill is commonly known as “object permanence”, but its solution indicates a broader capacity to consider non-present reality. McCune (2008) proposed a model for the child’s cognition at the transition to language that encompasses the cognitive abilities defined by Piaget (1954) and demonstrated in experimental research since that time (e.g., Hakke and Somerville 1985; Quinn 2003). This model asumes access to a cognitive background (Johnson 1987; Searle 1992) based on bodily experience gained over time that influences cognition and language. This embodied knowledge allows interpretation of present circumstances in relation to the recent past and to future events that can be anticipated based both on the background and on the perceived present. A critical feature of embodied knowledge is that it exists in real time as a continuous reference point for understanding ongoing experience. The 18-month-old solution to the Hakke and Somerville task exemplifies the child’s active sense of time, as he realizes that an object previously deposited under a screen can be retreived by a subsequent action on his own part. The sense of space assures him that the object will be found (future) where the hand was last seen (past). In offering objects to others, a frequent child activity, the sense of space between self and other, self and object, object and other, grounded in the cognitive background, is apparent.

16 Lorraine McCune and Ellen Herr-Israel Young children’s frequent use of words such as up or down, discussed later, suggests that that vertical space may be a priveleged aspect of background knowledge at the transition to language. This would not be surprising considering the salience of gravity to all humans, as toddlers learn, frequently experiencing unreliable balance in walking, being picked up and put down, and losing objects as they fall to the ground. 3.

Sources of dynamic event meaning

3.1. Salience of motion for children’s cognition Movement is highly salient to infants as they learn that objects and people in the world maintain their identity and appearance while undergoing a variety of motions in space. By 16 weeks of age infants use kinematic information to discriminate the form of a pictured object that is in motion from the background, and to maintain the identity of a three-dimensional moving object, distinctions that cannot be made for stationary objects even at 32 weeks (Kellman 1993). The salience of motion is further testified by distinct cellular patterns of brain activity occurring early in visual processing during perceptual segmentation of scenes by relative motion (Reppas et al. 1997). Spelke et al. (1994) reported that by 4 months of age infants were able to predict the location of an object based on continuity of motion, but failed to predict an object’s location when inertia (continued motion) needed to be considered. Knowledge of inertia was emergent in 8–10 month-olds who would have begun manual object exploration and learned more about the potential motions of objects, and of their own bodies, both purposeful and accidental. Spelke et al. suggest that their findings support separate modular processes underlying different forms of infant knowledge. Consideration of children’s activities with objects in the intervening period between about 4 and 12 months suggests continuity of development, with knowledge of inertia emerging later due to experience with objects. Children’s initial visual interest in object movement is continued in manipulation and play with objects as well described by Holly Ruff and colleagues (see below), providing rich opportunities for learning about such physical effects as inertia. Rather than separate modules, these findings suggest the development of advanced forms of knowledge following from the simpler abilities noted earlier. The special advantages offered by motion in early cognitive understanding prefigures the importance of motion in early lexical learning

Transition from single words to first sentences

17

(Werker et al. 1998) and of motion event understanding as a framework for acquiring language. 3.2. Sources of dynamic meaning in object play: An example In order to refer to objects and their relationships in movement, space, and time with language, children need to learn about these situations as they occur. The salience of containment as a figure/ground relationship suggests children’s knowledge of containment as a fruitful example. Mandler (2004) described the developmental course of children’s reactions to various visually presented possible and impossible containment events in preferential looking experiments, documenting changes occurring between 2 ½ and 7 ½ months. She interpreted these as indicating image schematic knowledge of containment. Despite these reactions to visual displays, children do not solve containment problems involving object manipulation at this age, and they seem by their actions to continue working on understanding containment during the second year of life. It may be that findings of preferential looking studies demonstrate underlying perceptual developments toward a more complete understanding that will be applicable to language acquisition during the second year. Examples from work by Sinclair, et al. (1989) demonstrate some activities children engaged while apparently trying to learn about containment. These investigators observed children between 9 and 24 months playing with sets of 18 toys consisting of six nesting cubes of different sizes, six balls of modeling clay small enough to fit into the cubes, and six wooden rods proportional in size to the other objects. The children showed a clear sequence of changing activities over age as they explored the spatial conditions for containment. Their earliest systematic actions seem to show a beginning interest in that quality of a single object that suits it to contain, or be contained by another object (or to contain fingers or be contained in the child’s mouth), rather than attempts to contain one object in another. One typical 10-month-old child lifted, shook, then let go of the largest cube, but then picked it right up again, tapped the inside with her hand, then scratched the outside. Rather than putting any of the objects into containers, she put her index finger in the smallest container, looked at it and let it go. She then picked it up, looked at it, put it in her mouth, then took it in both hands and put both index fingers inside it. These exploratory activities seem directed at experiencing aspects of objects that define potential “container” and “contained. Few children in the

18 Lorraine McCune and Ellen Herr-Israel early months of the study attempted to place objects in containment relationships with one another despite the fact that reactions to visual displays at their age have indicated an awareness of the “opening” aspect required for such containment by 2 ½ months (Hespos and Baillargeon 2001). When beginning to attempt containment of one object by another children of about 12 months used their own bodies as a point of organization in space as they explored the relationship between pairs of objects. For example, one child put a small ball in her mouth then tried to put it into a cube that was lying on its side. Failing, she set the cube upright, and successfully put the ball into it. Such experiences prompt internal spatial understanding: in this case the notion that an object must be upright to serve effectively as a container. She then put a smaller cube in her mouth, then into the larger cube with the other ball. Seemingly she used containment in her mouth as a strategy to identify the small ball and cube as potential “contents” for a separate additional object as container. The children use all three kinds of objects as “contents”: balls, sticks, and small cubes could all be placed inside larger cubes. All of the cubes were used as containers. This is of particular interest because it shows the child “playing” with the generality of a relational meaning across objects. The children explored important aspects of spatial relationship. The notions of “container”, “contained“, and orientation to ground (i.e., upright in the case of the cube) were noted and explored in relation to one another. Sometimes by their actions the children seemed to play with the intriguing idea that the same object could be both contents in one spatial relationship, and container in another. At first when a baby puts something in a container she will usually reverse the action immediately, taking hand and object out of the container, rather than releasing the object in the container. This paralells the delay in recognizing object inertia reported by Spelke et al. (1994) and also suggests that the notion of such construction, a direct relationship between two objects, without the child’s ongoing accompanying action is not yet possible. This sort of sequence also testifies to the notion of reversibility, a critical aspect of mental representation. Given any physical situation, one can imagine the reverse. With respect to containment, children’s behavior indicates that their ability to solve the simple problem of “what can contain what” is still in the process of development during the second year of life. It is not until 24 months or later that most children recognize the possibilities of the dual role of container and contained for the same object and show a systematic capacity for nesting several objects in size order.

Transition from single words to first sentences

19

To the linguist much of this information may seem remote and irrelevant. But evidence that children use their play to work out nonverbal elements of meaning that can later provide a frame for lingusitic expression supports the potential for this cognition/language link. Children’s earliest words refering to movement and change are based on the underlying cognitive background derived from these sorts of activities. 4. Motion event semantics and single dynamic event words Talmy (e.g. 1975, 1985, 2000) proposed a semantic approach to analyzing sentences so compatible with McCune-Nicolich’s (1981) cognitive interpretation of dynamic event words as to provide a complementary linguistic analysis and perform a bridging function between the cognitive basis of single words and the transition to early sentences. Talmy’s (1985, 1996, 2000) conception of the “motion event” is as a fundamental basis for structuring language expression by adults. A motion event is an overt experience that can be directly referenced with language. The following components are core: movement: any movement, or lack of movement, where remaining stationary is the limiting case. figure: “a moving, or conceptually moveable object whose site, path, or orientation” is the focus. (Talmy 1983: 232) ground: “a reference object (itself having a stationary setting within a reference frame) with respect to which the figure’s site, path, or orientation receives characterization.” (Talmy 1983: 232), path: “the course followed or the site occupied by the Figure object with respect to the Ground object” (Talmy 1985: 61). Additional situational aspects affecting a motion event and relevant to this discussion are: deixis: manner: force:

direction in relation to nearness or distance from the speaker, additional evidence regarding the way in which the motion occurred (e.g., walk or skip versus go), a subset of cause, involving the steady-state opposition of two forces (Talmy 1988: 53).

The examples of children’s actions on objects described above are also examples of motion events. The child who places a small ball in a box, then

20 Lorraine McCune and Ellen Herr-Israel retrieves it could be said to enact two motion events: (1) moving the figure (ball) along a path (toward containment) such that it has a relationship with a ground object (box); and (2) moving the figure along a path that removes it spatially from the ground (box). According to Talmy (1975, 2000), humans’ universal common experience and conceptualization of motion events forms the basis of later linguistic relationships. Sentences can be parsed into semantic constituents of motion. Early predication by dynamic event words specifies how the entity does (or may potentially) relate to other aspects of the motion event – i.e. whether it is moving or stationary, its location and/or path with respect to ground and the speaker, whether it is visibly present or hidden from view, and where it exists at a given moment in time. Hickman (2006) indicates, following Talmy (2000) that “In addition to motion per se (kinesis), which corresponds to the most basic inherent property of dynamic situations, the particular path that is followed by a displacement in space may constitute a more central type of information in comparison to the manner in which it is carried out” (302). Languages differ in their attention to manner of motion, and its lexical realization. In English, manner and motion are often conflated with path separately expressed. If path is the most salient aspect of motion, one would expect young children to encode path in the single word period, utilizing parts of speech typically encoding path in a given language. That is indeed the case, as will be shown below. Children’s direct experience of their own movement either in the vertical plane, when being lifted and lowered, or horizontally through locomotion or the approach or retreat of people and objects from the child’s location promotes knowledge of Path. Figure/Ground relationships are accompanied by words coding specific relationships in space, either static or the subject of ongoing motion on the part of the figure. These words specify the relationship between figure and ground without indicating additional details of the motion event, such as action by an agent, although the child may herself be acting on the objects at the time. Words spoken in relation to temporal event sequences indicate the child’s cognitive awareness of the reversible character of such events as they unfold in space and time, and the linguistic ability to mark with a word the central element of the event for the child at that time. These expressions tend to focus on situations where the child is physically involved. The development of dynamic event words is the child’s first step to specifying such relationships cognitively and expressing them linguistically in the ambient language or languages of their daily experience.

Transition from single words to first sentences

21

In integrating Talmy’s linguistic categories with child knowledge available at the beginning of language learning McCune and colleagues identified super-ordinate categories of dynamic event words (Herr-Israel and McCune 2006; McCune and Vihman 1999; Vihman 1999). These categories were formed by parsing the children’s word uses into groupings that link well with Talmy’s analysis while forming a coherent group of meanings in relation to children’s underlying knowledge of object, space, causality and time. We here define the categories with examples in English, and provide cross-linguistic evidence for this approach to analysis. Because of their grounding in child cognition and their salience to the child, children seek means of expression that may vary across languages. 4.1.

Path: Vertical and deictic

4.1.1. Vertical path In English both up and down are common early single dynamic event words expressing vertical path, although few children use both in the single word period. Examples in English for up include climbing on a chair, and trying to lift the cover of a book to open it. These words are generalized over a wide range of circumstances in English. Estonian does not offer a simple particle applicable to all vertical path situations. Rather varying word are used suited to different circumstances. Evidence available thus far suggest that where the adult language uses a specific word in specific circumstances, children’s early words follow suit, rather than generalizing broadly as they do in English. Further study is needed to settle this question. For example, sülle expresses ‘up (into arms), into lap’, but is not used for all vertical path meanings. Similarly, English senses of down are variously expressed in Estonian: alla ‘to down’ (from highchair), all ‘at down’, maha ‘to down, to the ground’ (throwing things), maas ‘at down’ (Vihman 1999). In French tombe ‘fall’, first in experiences of falling, later generalized, and en haut ‘up’ were used by one French child studied (McCune, Veneziano and Herr-Israel 2004). In Korean motion in the vertical direction is expressed by a variety of different words influenced both by whether the motion is spontaneous or caused and by different characteristics of the objects involved. Different verbs are always used in Korean for spontaneous and caused motion and children have been found to respect this, not generalizing meaning across this transitivity boundary. Choi and Bowerman (1991) found that the Korean-learning children they studied were later than the English-learning to

22 Lorraine McCune and Ellen Herr-Israel refer to vertical motion in general. While many English learners say up or down by 16 months of age, the general transitive verb ollita ‘cause to go up’ was used by few Korean learners even at 24 months of age. They used instead a variety of more specific transitive and intransitive verbs to express more specific notions of vertical motion. These include intransitive posture verbs such as ancta ‘sit down’ and ilenata, ‘get up’, as well as transitive verbs that specify ground in their meaning such as anta, ‘carry in arms’, and opta ‘carry on back’. This variety is required by the language; the fact that children produce these varied forms testifies to the salience of path to their communicative goals. If these verbs are used as single words, and in situations with reference exclusively to their own movements or positions, they would be functioning as dynamic event words, although their part of speech in Korean is that of verb. Early use of ollita (cause to go up) was observed in only one child, from 18 to 19 months. He incorrectly used this verb in situations where objects were replaced in their former location, or placed in a customary location regardless of any notion of verticality. This is a meaning common to English-learning children in their use of the word back, as in ‘put it back’. The authors traced this error to his mother using ollita as she placed an object in its customary place in a high cabinet. This example is of interest for two reasons. First, it demonstrates the notion of reversibility underlying dynamic event words: this overlap in meaning motivates the child’s error. Second, as Choi and Bowerman note, the child was learning a number of transitive verbs that include ground in their meaning, so he may have generalized this notion, assuming that ‘customary location’ was an aspect of the meaning of ollita. This “misuse” supports the claim made here that dynamic event words share a deep connection to cognition: in this case the reversibility of vertical motion is confused with the reversibility of placement in (or not in) a typical location. Korean learning children in the sample did not use ollita under appropriate conditions until several months later. 4.1.2. Deictic path Closeness and distance of objects and people in relation to the self is of critical interest to babies. They extend objects to their mothers, using the word here in English, and attempt to keep or gain control of objects, saying mine. The reversible nature of here is apparent from the fact that children learn this word as objects are transferred to them, then express it as they extend objects away from them. Mine has sometimes been considered an

Transition from single words to first sentences

23

expression of possession, but its spatial basis should be clear (Mandler 1992; Smiley and Huttenlocher 1995). Both here and mine are sometimes used as a generalized exchange word when passing objects back and forth, again emphasizing the notion of reversibility. In French, tiens (used similarly to English ‘here it is’, reduced to ta) serves this same purpose. Estonian-learning children code this meaning with various words: kätte ‘into hand’, aitäh ‘thanks’ (used in exchange), siin ‘at here’, siia ‘to here’, kaasa ‘take along (with self)’, ees ‘at ahead’. The meaning ‘take along with self’ does not seem to be expressed by English-learning children, but the dynamics of an object sharing the child’s trajectory is compatible with deictic path, demonstrating that an accessible word for a path meaning can prompt early learning. For Korean-learning children kata ‘come’ and ota ‘go’ are their earliest intransitive motion verbs, referencing movement of themselves toward or away from others, or movement of others toward or away from themselves (Choi and Bowerman 1991). The transitive verb cwuta ‘give’ is also a common early verb in Korean, probably with an exchange function similar to here in English (Gopnik and Choi 1995). Although verbs in form, in use these words are dynamic event words. Related to both vertical spatial direction and spatial relation to the child’s body is the use of words as the child places an object on a surface near themselves, necessarily involving a downward vertical movement (marking “end of path”). In English both here and there can be observed in this situation, not usually distinguishing distance from self as in the adult usage. Similarly, in French, là-bas ‘there’ was used and in Estonian, siin ‘at here’, siia ‘to here’. It is not clear from the available literature whether or how this meaning is coded in early Korean, but nohta ‘place object loosely on a surface’ is a possible candidate (Choi and Bowerman 1991). 4.2. Figure/ground: Reversible figure/ground relations Young children take great interest in placing objects in containers and then removing them. The object in hand is considered the figure, the container the ground. In English the word open is used to gain access to objects, sometimes as a request to remove the cover from a closed container, but also to request help in retrieving items from a container that is already opened. The words on and off are most typically used to refer to donning and removing clothing, but these may be more broadly generalized to other figure/ground situations. Attachment between objects typically receives only

24 Lorraine McCune and Ellen Herr-Israel negative expression in English, as stuck is most frequent when the children are failing to remove objects from attachment. In English the spatial relationships between entities (e.g., containment, support, attachment) are expressed with particles that are widely generalized across objects and situations. English learning children say stuck in situations where it is difficult to remove objects from tight fit, but may use out or open, generalized from more broadly defined situations of containment, lifting lids, etc. as a request to take apart tightly attached objects. One French child used difficile 'difficult' (where English-learners would say stuck) at 17–19 months, at 20–22 months, c’est dur 'that's hard' or simply dur 'hard' in this case, using words referring to their emotional reaction, rather than the physical aspects of the situation. Estonian-learning children say: kinni ‘closed’, sees ‘at inside’, sisse ‘to inside’, and välja ‘to outside’ in situations of opening, closing, and placing and removing from containment; lahti ‘unstuck’ for freeing from attachment. English-learning children say off for the removal of clothing. Both Korean-learning and Estonianlearning children include the body part concerned in words for donning clothing (Korean: ipta, ‘on trunk’; sinta ‘on feet’; ssuta, ‘on head’. Estonian: jalga ‘onto foot’, pähe ‘onto head’. Removal of clothing in Korean uses a single verb, pesta). While many of these words are verbs in the language, when used as single words for these sorts of situations, they qualify as dynamic event words. Bowerman (1989) was the first to note that spatial relations among objects were divided up differently across the world’s languages. For example, the categories of meaning, containment and support, seemingly simply designated by in versus on in English, are divided very differently across languages, including German, Dutch, Mixtec, and Cora. (The latter two are Native American languages of Mexico.) Bowerman’s data regarding these languages were incontrovertible. At the time she believed that “all languages make categorical distinctions among spatial configurations for the purpose of referring to them with a relatively small set of expressions such as the spatial prepositions of English” (p. 144). Shortly, evidence from Korean led Bowerman to recognize even greater variability across languages in this regard (Choi and Bowerman 1991). In Korean, as mentioned earlier, spatial words, usually verbs, are not generalized across the transitivity boundary. In addition, the English language categories of “containment” and “support” are divided differently in Korean in ways that often conflate the English senses of support versus containment. Individual verbs also may incorporate aspects of figure and/or ground, expressing more specific relationships covered globally by in or on in English.

Transition from single words to first sentences

25

Consequently, in Korean a long list of spatial verbs is needed to cover the semantic territory of in and on in English. Nonetheless, Korean-learning children make reference to the same types of situations as English-learning children do with their short list of dynamic event words. In Korean the earliest learned motion verbs are kkita ‘cause to fit tightly’, and ppayta ‘take apart tightly fitted objects’. In the available data on Korean, eight different transitive verbs were used by the majority of children in one or more studies to refer to situations that, in English, are covered by three or four spatial particles. Similarly, Estonian seems to employ a broader range of lexical items than English, although the extent of their generality has not been studied. Nonetheless, the commonality of the spatial movements and relationships that the children choose to encode are highly similar across languages, testifying to a common underlying preverbal cognitive understanding of space, time and motion. Given that in these languages verbs expressing these simple motion event meanings occur earlier than other verbs, this use seems driven by the same cognitive readiness as the more widely generalized particles of English. The additional distinctions expressed across the several verbs expressing, for example, vertical path in Estonian and Korean, do not seem to be part of a generalized linguistic repertoire, but rather contextually-based distinctions learned in relation to varied vertical path situations. Consequently, although these are verbs of the language, and later will function as such, as single words they are used as dynamic event words. 4.3. Temporal Path: Motion event sequence including previous and/or anticipated events These situations seem to simultaneously reference two distinct but related motion events, involving the same ground and the same or an equivalent figure where one event may be either remembered or anticipated.The dynamic event word indicates a mental comparison of the ongoing state of affairs to a prior, expected, or desired reverse alternative in relation to child action or access: iteration or conjunction (allgone, more, again) and potential reversibility or negation (no, uhoh, back). In addition to specific spatial movement with respect to gravity, the self, or movement of objects in figure/ground relationships with one another, children’s underlying general knowledge of space and time draws their attention to sequential events of importance to them. Critical here are occlusion events, iteration and recurrence, and negation.

26 Lorraine McCune and Ellen Herr-Israel Children’s willing participation in object permanence testing and informal hiding games attests to their interest in appearance/disappearance. Attachment relationships with parents, leading to distress at their absence, strengthens this interest. Furthermore, the potential of reversing currently experienced events is a focus of conscious attention. A simple example of this was provided by a 16 month old child who said back repeatedly as she opened and closed the door of a toy car, negating each action with the subsequent one. Reversibility itself was the focus of interest. 4.3.1. Occlusion/absence Children have expectations regarding what should be found where. A bottle that previously contained objects and is now empty, may elicit allgone in English. This use suggests comparison of the present state of affairs, an empty container, with a past state: the container being full. Typically, English-learning children use allgone in situations of absence or disappearance, although they sometimes say bye-bye. Examples include looking in an empty cup, after dumping objects from a container, searching for a doll. In some cases the “absence” is with respect to a location: the objects dumped from the container were present and visible on the floor but absent from the container. In Korean epista ‘not exist’ is used for disappearance situations, although no detail is available on the use of this word (Choi and Gopnik 1995). 4.3.2. Iteration/conjunction A child who places one piece in a puzzle, then says more while placing another piece, seems to be recognizing the sequential quality of these actions. English learners use more, again, and another in these situations: recall the example regarding request for another cookie. Estonian learners use the terms veel ‘more’, ‘again’, teine ‘other’ (breast, for nursing; hand, for washing) and jälle ‘again’ and French children use, encore ‘again’, ‘more’. Sometimes there is used with repeated placement of objects, repeatedly marking deictic path. 4.3.3. Negation/recognition of reversible sequence This category includes instances where the child seems to compare a current state of affairs with its opposite. In English, no, back, and uhoh were

Transition from single words to first sentences

27

used in circumstances where conditions in the environment conflicted with the child’s expectation, desire or effort. These words imply simultaneous consideration of a state of affairs and its inverse. If the child says no when a lid will not fit on a pot, awareness of the alternative possibility that it would fit is implied. McCune (2008) reports that children said no under the following circumstances: trying to put a lid on a toy pot and failing; when her mother was trying to put a shoe on the wrong doll; protesting as her mother tries to take a cookie box. In Estonian ei ‘no’ and tagasi ‘back’ seem most common, with valesti ‘wrongly’ also occurring. In French non ‘no’ is used. In English children commonly predict or recognize unfortunate occurrences with uh-oh. Examples: after the child falls on the floor; letting her mother know that her shoe was falling off. Gopnik and Meltzoff (1986) reported use of uh-oh in situations where children failed at a goal. One of our participants said this when trying to put a cover on a pot and failing. 4.3.4. Conclusion: Verb-like meaning is carried by single dynamic event words Children’s dynamic event words express the logical and reversible preconceptual understanding established through their observations of and participation in events in the real world as shaped by the organization of meaning in the ambient language. This understanding includes the ability to predict gravitational effects, such as what happens when objects are dropped (vertical path) or placed in a location, as well as possible relationships of closeness or distance between objects and self (deictic path). Topological notions relating figure and ground such as containment and attachment, as well as the location of the child’s body in space, are also demonstrated. Mental representation allows the child to understand brief time sequences of past, present, and future and to incorporate such meanings into dynamic language regarding ongoing events. It seems likely that dynamic event words are selected from the ambient language because each expresses a simple dynamic meaning that children understand and find interesting. In languages where verbs are used to encode these meanings, children produce these verbs earlier than others and may use several different verb forms for a given dynamic event meaning as required by that language. In languages where non-verb words generalize across related situations, these words are used, even if they are not verbs in the adult language. Vihman and McCune (1999) examined available data from their own studies and two other important studies from the literature.

28 Lorraine McCune and Ellen Herr-Israel Data summarized in Table 1 demonstrate the generality of dynamic event meanings that they found across several languages including both monolingual and bilingual children. Information in the table is taken from published studies of children beginning in the single word period as follows: participants 1–5 from the original McCune-Nicolich (1981) study that defined this phenomenon, participant 6 from Tomasello (1992), Participant 7 from McCune (1995), parti-cipants 8 and 9 from Vihman (1976, 1999), and participant 10 from Leopold (1939). The table demonstrates that each participant encoded the majority of the semantic relations described in their single word productions. In the following section we will discuss the relationship of this set of meanings to those encoded with the earliest verbs. 5. Primal verbs encode dynamic events We proposed that children would continue the motion-event meanings previously expressed with single words in their multiword utterances with verbs. While the single dynamic event words focus on the environmental movement or change, use of a verb form adds the child’s sense of agency. Huttenlocher, Charney and Smiley (1983) first reported that children’s earliest verb use began with expressions where the child was agent. Although these productions often omitted the subject, they occasionally included [I] or the child’s name as agent, suggesting a sense of self as a source of action. The non-linguistic sense of “self as agent” might be the cognitive impetus for the beginning use of words expressing agency. In our analyses (Herr-Israel 2006; McCune and Herr-Israel 2006) we have identified the same sorts of verbs as Huttenlocher et al.. These verbs, often termed “light”, or “general”, were termed “path-breaking” by Ninio (1999) because of their early occurrence, and apparent effect of launching the child into verb grammar. To test our proposal of continuity we examined all productions of five children previously studied by McCune (1981, 1995, 2008). These participants were chosen because by 24 months of age (the limit of these studies) they had produced a sufficient repertoire of verbs to address the questions of interest. (Additional research is needed to extend these findings to laterdeveloping children.) When we examined contexts of use by the children we recognized that many verbs both matched those reported earlier as general or light and that they were encoding meanings for the same sorts of events as those previously encoded with single dynamic event words (see

Transition from single words to first sentences

29

Tables 2a and 2b). For example, Deictic Path, expressions previously indicating movement or location in relation to the child’s body (e.g., here, there) now expanded, as Ninio (1999) also found, to encode movement toward, away from, or into the self, e.g., eat, give, get, put, take, see, want. Where single dynamic event words, up or down encoded movement in the vertical plane (Vertical Path), children now used verbs such as fall or drop. Movement or stasis of a figure object in relation to a ground object or surface (Figure/Ground) was now encoded with verbs such as close, find, and hide. In addition, verbs expressing Simple Agency in minimally defined action also occurred: (e.g., can, come, do, go, play, make). Non-primal verbs the children produced added complexity to the notion of action or agency implied in the primal verbs. Often that complexity was the expression of manner, an aspect of meaning frequently included in verbs in English. If the child used these verbs productively (across two or more agents and situations), the verbs were termed “Complex”. However, early uses of these verbs were restricted to specific routine activities or to accompanying child action. In these cases the verbs were termed “Restricted”. For example, fix was initially used by one child only when playing with toy tools (restricted), later he used fix in a variety of situations. Another used ride only when playing with a toy truck, but later across situations. Children tended to produce non-verb dynamic event words in their earliest combinations, then begin primal verb use, before using complex verbs productively. They varied in their extent of producing restricted verbs. Table 3 shows the order of productive acquisition for types of dynamic event words and these categories of verbs for the five children studied. Figures 1–5 show the individual trajectories of the children. Dynamic event words were the most frequent and earliest way of referencing motion events for all participants. Primal verbs came to dominate for the three most advanced participants (Rick, Sandra, and Alice). More variability is seen in the restricted use of verbs and the gradual development of complex verbs. The latter were only beginning for the most advanced children at the end of the study. In many cases when verbs began to be used they occurred with earlier dynamic event words, adding only a sense of agency to the original meaning (Table 4). For example, Alice expresses Vertical Path at 16 months using the dynamic event word down accompanying a downward movement. At 20 months she emphasizes her action of forcing a lid down by using the verb go in addition to the dynamic event word down. At 21 and 22 months she expands utterance length and meaning further, but remains limited in verb use to expressing a very general action meaning. Our findings demonstrate

30 Lorraine McCune and Ellen Herr-Israel child prior ability to convey with single dynamic event words the same semantic intentions incorporated in the first combinations with verbs. The study supports two bootstrapping steps. First children develop dynamic event meanings derived from underlying cognitive understanding. Second, encoding of these events with single words provides a semantic foundation for the development of verbs encoding agency as the child develops a sense of self as agent. One might significantly ask, “How do these earlier processes relate to later syntactic and semantic development?” On the semantic side one can look to the “fleshing out” of the remaining motion-event components as subsequent steps. As to syntax, one might anticipate the combinations of words analyzable as “constructions” (Goldberg 1995). According to Ninio (2006) the learning of syntax can be reduced to the learning of specific verbs and their required complements, so the first verbs derived, via dynamic event words, from early cognition, launch a continuous learning process culminating in adult linguistic knowledge. Appendix Table 1. Dynamic Event Words Used by 10 Children: 7 Learning English and 3 Bilingual, Learning English (E) and Estonian (S) or German (G) Motion Categories

Participants 1

Path Path: Vertical down up Path: Deictic here/thanks mine there Figure/Ground Containment open closed out in Attachment stuck/fitted fitted fitted Unstuck (invented)

2

3

4

5

8E

8S

9E

9S

× × × × × × × × × × × × ×

× ×

×

× ×

× ×

× × × × ×

× × × × ×

×

×

×

×

× × × × × × × ×

× × × ×

× × × ×

× × × ×

× × ×

× × ×

×

×

×

×

×

×

× × × × × × × × × ×

×

6

7

×

10E 10G

×

31

Transition from single words to first sentences Motion Categories

Participants 1

Time: Reversible Event Sequence/Iteration Occlusion allgone 'bye peekaboo Iteration/Conj. more again Negation (Reversal) no uhoh back

2

3

4

5

6

7

8E

8S

9E

× × × × × × × × × × × × × ×

×

×

×

× × × × × × × × ×

× ×

×

×

×

×

× × × × × × × × × × × × × × × × ×

9S

10E 10G

×

×

Data sources are as follows: 1 (Shanti), 2 (Mira), 3 (Meri), 4 (Janis), and (5) Tracy are drawn from McCune-Nicolich (1981); 6 (T) from Tomasello, 1992; 7 (Aurie), from McCune (1995), 8 (Virve) and 9, (Raivo) from Vihman (1976, 1985, 1999); 10 is from Leopold (1939).

Table 2a. Dynamic Event Categories of Single Words Category

Dynamic Event Words

Deictic Path Vertical Path Figure/Ground

here, there, mine up, down out, in, open, close, stuck, unstuck , allgone*

Note: The word allgone expresses reversible change over time in a figure/ ground relationship.

Table 2b. Dynamic Event Categories of Primal Verb Meanings Category

Verbs Observed

Deictic Path Verbs

come*, drink, eat*, feed, feel, give, gave, get, go*, have*, help*, hold*, like*, look*, leave, need, put*, see*, take*, took, want* close*, find, found, hide* can, do, make*, play*

Figure/Ground Verbs Simple Agency Verbs

*Note: The verbs with an asterisk are those that were used by three or more of the children.

32 Lorraine McCune and Ellen Herr-Israel Table 3. Sequence Category Expression: Month of first productive use of dynamic event words Dynamic Event Words

Primal Verbs

Restricted Verbs Complex Verbs

Jase

22

Aurie

21

22

Rick

19

19

23

Sandra

17

17

20

23

Alice

18

18

18

20

Table 4. Examples of Transition from Single Dynamic Event Words to Primal Verb Word Combinations Category/Child I. Path: Vertical •Alice

16 months: down 20 months: go down 21 months: put down for baby 22 months: get down play

(drops ping pong ball) (closes elephant J-box) (puts bottle on table) (asking researcher to join her in play)

II. Figure/Ground •Aurie

17 months: off (wants doll’s diaper off) 21 months: off, off (takes doll’s shoes off) 22 months: off diaper … off clothes (wants Mom to take them off) 24 months: take diaper off… I want to take it off (Aurie is the agent)

Note: Examples are taken from Herr-Israel and McCune (2006).

Transition from single words to first sentences   
   


  

 
 
 

  



 



  






 

 

 !






























































!  
 


  
" 

 

 
"

Figure 1. Jase’s Dynamic Event Word Development

 


   

  

 

 










 


 
! 


 
 

 
  
  "

















 



Figure 2. Aurie’s Dynamic Event Word Development

   
    

  

 
  
 




 

  











 

 





 
  
#      
   
  
 
  
   $


Figure 3. Rick’s Dynamic Event Word Development

33

34 Lorraine McCune and Ellen Herr-Israel
  


  

  





 






 



 














   
  
 
#   
  

  
 $





 

Figure 4. Sandra’s Dynamic Event Word Development

   
     
 
  

   
   
  


    
   


 














  

  




   
   
   
      
   



    
    


Figure 5. Alice’s Dynamic Event Word Development

References Barsalou, Lawrence W. 2005 Abstraction as dynamic interpretation in perceptual symbol systems. In: Lisa Gershkoff-Stowe and David Rakison (eds.), Building object categories in developmental time, 389–431. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Bloom, Lois 1973 One word at a time. The Hague: Mouton. Bloom, Lois and Margaret Lahey 1978 Language development and language disorders. New York: Wiley.

Transition from single words to first sentences

35

Bowerman, Melissa 1989 Learning a semantic system: What role do cognitive predispositions play? In: Mabel L. Rice and Richard L. Schiefelbusch (eds.), The teachability of language, 133–169. Baltimore: Paul Brooks. Choi, Soonja and Melissa Bowerman 1991 Learning to express motion events in English and Korean: The influence of language-specific lexical patterns. Cognition 41: 83–121. Choi, Soonja and Alison Gopnik 1995 Early acquisition of verbs in Korean: A cross-linguistic study. Journal of Child Language 22: 497–529. Goldberg, Adele 1995 Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Gopnik, Alison and Soonja Choi 1995 Names, relational words, and cognitive development in English and Korean Speakers: Nouns are not always learned before verbs. In: Tomasello; Michael and William E. Merriman (eds.), Beyond names for things: young children’s acquisition of verbs, 63–80. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Gopnik, Alison and Andrew Meltzoff 1986 Relations between semantic and cognitive development in the oneword stage: the specificity hypothesis. Child Development 57: 1040– 1053. Haith, Marshall M. 1998 Who put the cog in infant cognition? Is rich interpretation too costly? Infant Behavior and Development 21: 167–179. Hakke, Robert J. and Susan J. Somerville 1985 Development of logical search skills in infancy. Developmental Psychology 21: 176–186. Herr-Israel, Ellen 2006 Single Words to Combinations: Longitudinal analysis reveals constructive processes integrating lexical and pragmatic development within a conversational context. Rutgers University: Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. Hespos, Susan J. and Renée Bailargeon 2001 Reasoning about containment events in very young children. Cognition 78: 207–245. Hickman, Maya 2006 The relativity of motion in first language. In: Maya Hickman and Stephane Robert (eds.), Space in languages, 281–306. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Huttenlocher, Janellen, Patricia Smiley and Rosalind Charney 1983 Emergence of action categories in the child: Evidence from verb meaning. Psychological Review 90: 72–93.

36 Lorraine McCune and Ellen Herr-Israel Johnson, Mark 1987 The body in the mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Kellman, Philip 1993 Kinematic foundations of infant Visual perception. In: Carl Granrud (ed.), Visual perception and cognition in infancy. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Leopold, Werner F. 1939 Speech development of a bilingual child. Volume I: Vocabulary growth in the first two years. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Mandler, Jean M. 1992 How to build a baby: II. Conceptual primitives. Psychological Review 99: 587–604. Mandler, Jean M. 2004 The foundations of mind. New York: Oxford University Press. McCune-Nicolich, Lorraine 1981 Toward symbolic functioning: Structure of early pretend games and potential parallels with language. Child Development 52: 785–797. McCune, Lorraine 1995 A normative study of representational play at the transition to language. Developmental Psychology 31: 198–206. McCune, Lorraine 2006 Dynamic event words: From common cognition to varied linguistic expression. First Language 26: 233–255. McCune, Lorraine 2008 How children learn to learn language. New York: Oxford University Press. McCune, Lorraine, Edy Veneziano and Ellen Herr-Israel 2004 Analysis of motion-event semantics in the transition from single words to combinatorial speech: Evidence from English and French. Paper presented on the 2nd Lisbon Meeting on language acquisition with special reference to Romance languages. McCune, Lorraine and Marilyn M. Vihman 1999 Relational words and motion events: A universal bootstrap to syntax? Poster presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Albuquerque, New Mexico. McCune-Nicolich, Lorraine 1981 The cognitive basis of relational words. Journal of Child Language 8: 15–36. Ninio, Anat 1999 Pathbreaking verbs in syntactic development and the question of protypical transitivity. Journal of Child Language 26: 619–653. Ninio, Anat 2006 Language and the learning curve. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Transition from single words to first sentences

37

Piaget, Jean 1954 The construction of reality in the child. New York: Basic Books. Piaget, Jean and Bärbel Inhelder 1969 The psychology of the child. New York: Basic Books. Quinn, Paul C. 2003 Concepts are not just for objects: Categorization of spatial relational information by infants. In: David I. Rakison and Lisa M. Oakes (eds.), Early category and concept development: Making sense of the blooming buzzing confusion, 50–76. New York: Oxford University Press. Reppas, John B., Sourabh Niyogl, Anders M. Dale, Martin I. Sereno and Roger B. H. Tootell 1997 Representation of motion boundaries in retinotopic human visual cortical areas. Nature 388: 175–179. Sartre, Jean-Paul 1948/62 The psychology of imagination. New York: Philosophical Library. Searle, John 1992 The rediscovery of the mind. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press. Sinclair, Hermina, Mira Stambak, Irene Lezine, Sylvie Rayna and Min Verba 1989 Infants and objects: The creativity of cognitive development. New York: Academic Press. Sinclair, Hermina 1970 The transition from sensorimotor to symbolic activity. Interchange 1: 119–126. Smiley, Patricia and Janellen Huttenlocher 1995 Conceptual development and the child's early words for events, objects, and persons. In: Michael Tomasello and William E. Merriman (eds.), Beyond names for things: Young children's acquisition of verbs, 21–62. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum. Spelke, Elizabeth S., Gary Katz, Susan E. Purcell, Sheryl M. Ehrlich and Karen Breinleiner 1994 Early knowledge of object motion: continuity and inertia. Cognition 51: 131–176. Talmy, Leonard 1975 The semantics and syntax of motion. In: John P. Kimball (ed.), Semantics and syntax, 181–238. New York: Academic. Talmy, Leonard 1983 How language structures space. In: Herbert Pick and Linda Acredolo (eds.), Spatial orientation: Theory, research, application, 225–282. New York: Plenum Press. Talmy, Leonard 1985 Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In: Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description. Volume III: Grammatical categories and the lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

38 Lorraine McCune and Ellen Herr-Israel Talmy, Leonard 1988 Force dynamics in language and cognition. Cognitive Science 12: 49–100. Talmy, Leonard 1996 Fictive motion in language and “caption”. In: Paul Bloom, Mary A. Peterson, Lynn Nadel and Merrill F. Garrett (eds.), Language and space: Language, speech, and communication, 211–276. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Talmy, Leonard 2000 Toward a cognitive semantics. Volume I: Concept structuring systems. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Tomasello, Michael 1992 First verbs: A case study of early grammatical development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tomasello, Michael 2003 Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Vihman, Marilyn M. 1976 From pre-speech to speech: On early phonology. Stanford Papers and Reports in Child Language development 12: 230–244. Vihman, Marilyn M. 1999 The transition to grammar in a bilingual child: Positional patterns, model learning, and relational words. The International Journal of Bilingualism 3: 267–301. Werker, Janet F., Leslie B. Cohen, Valerie L. Lloyd, Marianella Casasola and Christine L. Stager 1998 Acquisition of word-object associations by 14-month-old infants. Developmental Psychology 34: 1289–1309. Werner, Heinz and Bernard Kaplan 1963/84 Symbol formation. New York: Wiley.

Bootstrapping and the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese: A natural semantic metalanguage perspective Adrian Tien

By means of a set of simple, indefinable concepts apparently existent in the heart of any language known as conceptual or semantic “primes”, Natural Semantic Metalanguage researchers explore “certain hypotheses about the nature and identities of the innate concepts which may underpin language acquisition” (Goddard 2001: 193). Those “certain hypotheses” formulated relate to the kind of conceptual/semantic knowledge/skill that may actually facilitate lexico-semantic and lexico-syntactic acquisition, in a comparable way as conjectured by the Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis. This chapter takes child Mandarin as the child language in question and examines evidence from naturalistic production data of ten young children acquiring Mandarin. Preliminary results indicate that the lexical exponents of all NSM primes are present in child Mandarin before the end of the fourth year. In addition, before a prime is lexically represented in production, it may first be conceptually present as core semantic elements in the meanings of common nonprime words. This phenomenon is termed “latency”, following Tien (1999). Our findings indicate that child Mandarin and adult Mandarin probably operate on lexico-semantically and lexico-syntactically commensurate systems, with the NSM accounting for their commensurability and, in turn, developmental continuity, though we have also taken various variables into consideration.

1. Background The word “bootstrapping” conjures up two images (among possibly others), one of which is that of “boots” and “straps” – and this image immediately reminds us of a version of a German legend about Baron Münchhausen who is said to have saved himself by lifting himself up using his own bootstraps (e.g. Crystal 1997: 45–46). The other image that comes to mind is connected with computing, in which “bootstrapping refers to a process where a simple/short system activates the more complicated/longer system that serves the same purpose”1. From the perspective of the Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis (LBH hereafter), the first image evokes the idea of making deductions, say, about syntax (the “lifting” analogy) using existing

40 Adrien Tien semantic information (the “bootstraps” analogy), whilst the second image brings to mind the idea of, say, accessing syntactic information (the “more complicated/longer system” analogy) using existing semantic information, based on semantic roles etc. (the “simpler/shorter system” analogy). The LBH is, of course, much more sophisticated than what these mere images suggest. What is interesting and important, however, is whether the LBH might at all fit in with other hypotheses and theories about language acquisition and, if so, how. From the perspective of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM hereafter) which the present study adopts, the view here is that there is considerable compatibility between the LBH and the NSM. As with the famous statement by Bowerman (1985: 1284), “children’s starting semantic space is not tabula rasa”, NSM proponents generally share the view that children are equipped with semantic and conceptual building “blocks” at the outset, and it is these blocks that pre-equip children with the semantic information necessary to gain access to more complex semantic information (in the target adult language) and to make deductions about the lexico-syntax or lexico-semantics of a language. In fact, the NSM researcher contends that “certain” semantic information is “there” at the outset, prelinguistic and possibly innate – in this sense, such information is not only “existing” but “pre-existing” – and, furthermore, that developmental continuity can be accounted for because this information is commensurable with the adult’s semantic system (e.g. Goddard 2001; Wierzbicka 1996; Goddard 1998). But what is this “certain” semantic information? According to the central tenets of the NSM which are well-known (e.g. Wierzbicka 1996; Goddard and Wierzbicka eds. 2002), there is, in principle, a set of 60 or so semantically irreducible and universal concepts known as conceptual or semantic “primes” whose lexical counterparts can be identified in the heart of any of the world’s languages. Can it be that
primes represent the semantic information in question which are possibly innate to children and which are likely to facilitate lexico-semantic and lexico-syntactic representations? From the standpoint that the child’s language is a human language, after all, there is no reason why NSM claims relating to world’s languages shouldn’t apply to child language, too. And it is true that NSM primes have been conceptually, semantically and lexically attested in all languages studied thus far (e.g. Goddard and Wierzbicka 2002, Volume I: 8–12), including English and Mandarin Chinese child languages (e.g. Wierzbicka 1995; Tien 1999; Bigg 2002; Goddard 2001). This finding comes as no surprise and, in fact, adds weight to the premise that the child’s and the adult’s semantic systems are not

Bootstrapping and the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese 41 Table 1. Inventory of NSM primes (based on Goddard 2003) Substantives: Determiners: Quantifiers: Mental predicates: Existence, possession: Speech: Actions, events, movements: Life and death: Attributes: Time: Space: Partonomy, taxonomy: Similarity: Logical concepts:

I, you, someone (person), something (thing), people, body this, the same, other some, one, two, many (much), all think, know, want, feel, see, hear there is, have say, word, true do, happen, move live, die good, bad, big, small when, before, after, a long time, a short time, now where (place), under, above, far, near, side, inside, here, touch (contact) part (of), kind (of) like (how, as) not, can, very, maybe, if, because

only not radically incompatible but are actually mutually commensurable, based on a shared semantic information that is represented by NSM primes. Furthermore, if there is semantic/conceptual continuity between the child’s and the adult’s lexico-semantic systems, then it would make sense to conclude from this finding that such continuity is based on semantic commensurability between the child’s and the adult’s semantic systems, with primes being the main “mechanism” for that continuity. Hence, in going back to the LBH bootstrapping analogy, the child doesn’t lift herself up with bootstraps as did Baron Münchhausen but utilises the same semantic system – the NSM primes – as do adults to proceed with the lexico-semantic and lexico-syntactic developmental process and, instead of computer programs, the child draws on her pre-existing semantic resources, namely the semantically simple/indefinable NSM primes, to enter into the semantically, lexically and syntactically complex, adult linguistic system. To be precise, in making claims about NSM primes bootstrapping lexico-semantic development, we can examine certain aspects of the hypothesis of semantic bootstrapping to see how the NSM and the LBH might fit in with each other. To the extent that, in semantic bootstrapping, children are thought to have semantic and conceptual knowledge that they use to express linguistic universals in particular grammatical categories (e.g.

42 Adrien Tien Pinker 1987: 406–407), it is postulated that NSM primes represent such semantic and conceptual knowledge e.g. children possess a priori semantic concepts of “substantive” primes involving I, you, someone (person), something (thing) (among other primes) which are required for the category known as ‘nouns’, as well as a priori knowledge of “attributive” primes involving good, bad, big and small (among other primes) which form the semantic and conceptual basis for the category known as ‘adjectives’, etc. To the extent that, in semantic bootstrapping, children utilise semantic information to figure out syntax (e.g. Karmiloff-Smith 1992: 45–47), the NSM subscriber believes that, in the beginning, children draw on universally attested combinatorial properties of primes, valency options available to each prime as well as canonical sentences. Knowledge of how primes combine universally and syntactically is equally pivotal for the acquisition of semantically complex words in terms of making sense of the words’ semantic structures, semantic roles and syntactic realisations – for instance, in the example of the English verb give presented by Crystal (1997: 45–46), it is not only that the child needs to grasp that giving “involves a giver, a gift and a receiver” but, more importantly, s/he needs to be aware that the semantically complex structure of give involves something like someone (X) does something (i.e. the giver (X) carries out the act of giving) and because of this, someone (Y) has something (Z) (i.e. the ‘receiver’ (Y) comes to be in possession of the ‘gift’ (Z) as a result of the act of ‘giving’). Last but not least, whilst the NSM model acknowledges the importance of linguistic, non-linguistic and extralinguistic contexts from observations of language use in semantic bootstrapping (what Gleitman referred to as the “observational learning hypothesis”, as cited by Karmiloff-Smith ibidem; see also Snedeker and Gleitman 2004: 257–293, Siskind 2002: 121–153), as stated before, NSM proponents maintain that there is a set of semantic concepts – the NSM primes – which form part of the innate semantic and conceptual knowledge that help children to work out meanings of unknown words in their natural contexts. Therefore, though observing the act of ‘giving’ in context may facilitate children’s understanding of the meaning of the verb give, without an a priori knowledge of primes such as someone, something, do, because etc., it would be unlikely that the child would ever even begin the process of acquiring the meaning of ‘give’ in the first place. This chapter presents preliminary studies and findings of young children’s acquisition of Mandarin Chinese (Mandarin hereafter) during the first four years of life, looking at how NSM primes may bootstrap lexicosemantic and lexico-syntactic development in their language. To be sure, we have investigated:

Bootstrapping and the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese 43

(A) whether NSM primes are lexically expounded by semantically simple words in child Mandarin production data – if so, such lexical exponents of NSM primes are referred to as “lexical primes”; (B) whether lexical primes identified at (A) (if any) demonstrate, through the ways in which they combine to make simple sentences, syntactic tendencies that would, one way or the other, substantiate Goddard’s (2001: 217–218) report that “primes have valency, complementation and combinatorial properties (which) are the basis of syntactic structure at large in the adult language” – if so, such syntactic or combinatorial tendencies would not only confirm Goddard’s claims about universal combinatorial properties based on NSM primes but also give evidence in favour of lexico-syntactic bootstrapping stemming from the ways in which NSM primes as lexical primes combine; and, (C) whether NSM primes are conceptually represented or embedded in semantically complex words in child Mandarin data – if so, such conceptual representations of NSM primes are referred to as “conceptual primes”. In addition, we have taken into consideration an NSM prime that might have appeared in an adult’s input language and that a child had obviously understood, though the prime in question might not actually have occurred in the child’s output language. In our view, such an NSM prime may be regarded as a “comprehended” lexical prime which is comparable to (A) above, since it is a lexical exponent in production at any rate, even if had not been uttered by the child her/himself. Usually the evidence for the child’s comprehended lexical prime is considered pretty strong e.g. a child understands zuo4/nong4 which expounds the prime do when s/he responds appropriately to the adult question, ta1 zai4 zuo4 she2me? ‘what is s/he doing?’ by confidentially and appropriately describing what the person in question is doing. 2. The data Four sets of naturalistic, production data, based on corpora from ten children collected by researchers in Australia, Taiwan and China, were selected for scrutiny on account of their individual merits as well as on the basis of how well the corpora complemented each other in terms of quantity, quality and diversity (see Table 2 below): 2

44 Adrien Tien Table 2. Child Mandarin production data used in this study Name of corpora

No.of transcripts

No. of Origin of children children

Comments

CHILDES

6

3

Beijing, China

Longitudinal; between 1st and 3rd birthdays. Data from transcripts based on recordings taken over two sessions, one during the 2nd year and the other during the 3rd year.

FCU (Fujen Catholic University)

92

3

Taipei, Taiwan

Cross-sectional and longitudinal; Data from birth to 4th birthday. Data from transcripts based on recordings generally taken once every fortnight.

NTNU (National Taiwan Normal University)

29

3

Taipei, Taiwan

Cross-sectional and longitudinal; data from birth to 3rd birthday. Data from transcripts based on recordings taken over irregular monthly intervals.

Tien

3, plus diary 1 notes and notes from interviewing adult caretakers

Total

127

Canberra, Irregular and ad hoc longitudinal; Australia from 1st to 4th birthday. Data from a combination of diary notes, notes taken from interviewing adult caretakers and (less so) transcripts from irregular observation sessions.

10

At least from the perspective of the current study, the “quality” of the data had to do with the extent to which information contained in a transcript gave us an indication of the child’s linguistic development captured at the time, and the “quantity” of the data had to do with how much information contained in a transcript gave us a glimpse of the child’s linguistic development captured at the time. Quality and quantity are not necessarily mutually exclusive criteria, and in fact these are also related to “diversity” and, in terms of longitudinal data, this had to do with whether information was collected over regular or irregular intervals, how long each interval was, and how long the overall observation period spanned. In terms of crosssectional data, what mattered (to a greater or lesser extent) included, among other things, what the child uttered (e.g. dialogues and monologues were

Bootstrapping and the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese 45

preferred over imitated utterances modelling on adults’ linguistic input), how much the child uttered (e.g. whether the child merely uttered a few words and/or sentences), when/where the child made the utterances (i.e. context and environment) etc. that a transcript managed to capture from a particular recording session. With these criteria in mind, one can be reminded that just because a subject might be represented by many transcripts doesn’t mean that each transcript would necessarily be either more interesting (i.e. more qualitative) or more comprehensive (i.e. more quantitative) than other transcripts, and, conversely, just because a subject is represented by few transcripts doesn’t mean that each transcript would necessarily be either less informative (i.e. less qualitative) or less comprehensive (i.e. less quantitative) than other transcripts. Taken as a whole, corpora from ten subjects make it possible for not only cross-sectional or longitudinal comparisons but, in fact, both, which is the intention of this study i.e. an investigation into a sample population of children, rather than individual children. The children themselves had a lot in common. For instance, even though (standard) Mandarin was the target language for every subject, dialectal influences would have been inevitable since all adult caretakers across the corpora speak not only Mandarin but also Min (also known as Hokkien) and/or Hakka in the case of FCU and NTNU corpora (which are two of the main Chinese dialects spoken in Taiwan apart from Mandarin), Wu in the case of the Tien data (which is the dialect spoken in Shanghai region), or a regional variety of Mandarin in the case of data from CHILDES (cf. footnote 5). Speaking of adult caretakers, every child across the corpora had multiple adult caretakers – mostly a parent or relatives, but also friends, visitors and/or researchers. On top of this, many of the adult caretakers in the corpora, particularly the parents, were keen to be seen as modelling and tutoring their children during the observation sessions e.g. teaching them how to say certain things. An example of this was colour identification and labelling, which turned out to be many adults’ favourite activities with children. Last but not least, much similarity was observed for all ten children in terms of where language development tended to be taking place i.e. linguistic environment and the media through which language was being input. Mandarin acquisition seemed to be happening during mealtime, dressing, bathing, playing, watching television, reading story/picture books (or pretending to be reading), cleaning, shopping, etc. Television and story/picture books were, in fact, two most prominently featured means of inputting language to children across the corpora – no wonder many children were good story-tellers, particularly their account of witches, animals, princesses and princes, etc.

46 Adrien Tien 3. What are the lexical primes in child Mandarin? Preliminary facts and findings The sixth column in Table 3 below documents child Mandarin lexical primes that we have identified, against corresponding adult Mandarin lexical primes (in the third column) previously put forward by Chappell (2002: 316) (except where it is marked * which are new additions to the inventory of NSM primes). Table 3. Child and adult Mandarin lexical primes, their frequencies and frequency rankings3 NSM prime “cluster”

NSM prime in question

Adult Manda- Tally of total rin lexical frequency of prime, based occurrences on Chappell of adult (2002: 316) Mandarin lexical prime4

Ranking of an Child Mandaadult Manda- rin lexical rin lexical prime prime’s frequency of occurrence out of all primes in the NSM inventory

Tally of total frequency of occurrences of Child Mandarin lexical prime during first four years

Ranking of a child Mandarin lexical prime’s frequency of occurrence out of all primes in the NSM inventory

wo3

2460050

2

wo3

1171

2

you

ni3

870826

12

ni3

553

7

someone/person/ who

shei2, you3ren2

126057

52

shei2, 262 you3(yi2ge)re n2, ta1, ren2

17

someshen2me, thing/thing/w you3shi4, hat dong1xi1

512889

24

shen2me, ta1, 303 dong1xi1, (you3) shi4 (qing2)

15

8

ren2, ren2jia1, ta1men

102

27

X is a part of X shi4 Y (de) 165008 Y bu4fen4, X you3 Y

50

(yi2) bu4fen4, 165 Xwhole you3 Ypart

20

knd of

zhong3

233260

41

zhong3, 16 shen2me+NP

48

body

shen1ti3

178031

46

shen1ti3, shen1

2

57

this

zhe4 (ge)

934255

11

zhe4(ge)

966

4

one

yi1 (ge)

2404890

3

yi1

498

9

two

liang3 (ge), er4

241494

39

er4, liang3

154

22

many/much

hen3 duo1, duo1xu3duo1

513413

23

duo1, xu3duo1

95

28

all

dou1, suo3yo 469969 u3 (de)

28

dou1, quan2(bu4)

88

32

Substantives I and substantive relations

people

Specifiers

ren2men, ren2 1515532

Bootstrapping and the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese 47 the same

tong2yang4 – 368189 tong2yi1, yi2 yang4

32

(gen1/xiang4 29 …)yi2yang4, tong2yi1

46

other

bie2 (de)

179725

44

bie3(de), ling4(wai4), qi2ta1

32

43

Some

you3 de, you3 287024 xie1, yi4xie1

37

zhe4 xie1, ji3 32 xie1, (you3) yi4 dian3(dian3), zhe4 ji3 ge

44

good

hao3

821552

13

hao3

502

8

bad

huai4, bu4 hao3

43444

59

huai4, bu4 hao3

421

21

big

da4

1784738

7

da4

159

10

small

xiao2

505128

25

xiao3

417

11

Intensifier

very

hen3

398653

31

hen3, hao3, da4

103

26

Mental Predicates

want

yao4

985803

9

yao4

1081

3

see

kan4dao4

603362

20

kan4

367

14

feel

gan3jue2

206433

43

(X) 204 hen3/hao3 Y lit. ‘(X) very Y’, jue2de

18

think

xiang3

500920

26

xiang3

74

38

know

zhi1dao4

411710

30

zhi1dao4

36

42

hear

ting1dao4

179094

45

ting1

20

47

say

shuo1

606951

19

shuo1, jiang3 89

30

word

zi4, hua4

251335

38

hua4/zi4, jiao4

83

35

true

zhen1

319944

36

zhen1 (de)

5

52

touch

(Not given)

16910

61

peng4, muo1 46

40

do

zuo4

177402

47

zuo4, nong4

78

36

move

dong4

241231

40

dong4, ban1

46

41

happen

fa1sheng1

2177117

5

zen3(me)/zhe 90 4(me) yang4, you3

29

you3

2177117

6

you3

880

5

have

you3

2177117

4

you3

781

6

die

si3

109006

54

si3, zou3

31

45

live (alive)

huo1, sheng1huo2

563356

21

Not found

0

59

more

duo1

489086

27

hai2, duo1, zai4, bu4/mei2 le

379

12

Descriptors and Evaluators

Speech

Actions, events and movement

Existence and there is/are Possession Life and Death

Augmentor

→

48 Adrien Tien NSM prime “cluster”

NSM prime in question

Adult Manda- Tally of total rin lexical frequency of prime, based occurrences on Chappell of adult (2002: 316) Mandarin lexical prime

Ranking of an Child Mandaadult Manda- rin lexical rin lexical prime prime’s frequency of occurrence out of all primes in the NSM inventory

Tally of total frequency of occurrences of Child Mandarin lexical prime during first four years

Ranking of a child Mandarin lexical prime’s frequency of occurrence out of all primes in the NSM inventory

Logical concepts

not

bu4

2698226

1

bu4, mei2

1925

1

can

neng2

631803

16

hui4, ke3yi3, 375 neng2, xing2

13

i

ru2guo3

624900

17

ru2guo3/yao4 12 shi4, Protasis+de hua4, jiu4, hui4+ Apodosis

50

maybe

ke3neng2

944875

10

ke3neng2, hao3xiang4

55

because

yin1wei4

799975

14

yin1wei4,wei 76 4shen2me/gan 4ma2

37

a short time

yi4hui3(r)

22063

60

yi2xia4/yi4hu 9 i3(r)

51

before

yi3qian2

321366

35

yi3qian2

14

49

After

yi3hou4

436134

29

yi3hou4, hou4lai2, jiu4, ran2hou4

87

33

time/when

shi2hou4

620545

18

shi2hou4

4

54

a long time

hen3jiu3

72180

56

Not found

0

58

now

xian4zai4

324673

34

xian4zai4

3

56

moment

(Not given)

147875

51

jiu4

73

39

58845

58

Not found

0

61

place/where (shen2me) 355012 di4fang1, na(r )3/na(r)4

33

na3li3, di4fang1, na4li3

111

25

here

zhe(r)4

176837

48

zhe4li3

268

16

below

xia4mian4, xi 556987 a4

22

xia4mian4, xia4

148

23

above

shang4mian, s 780162 hang4

15

shang4mian4, 130 shang4

24

inside

li3mian4

49

li3mian4, li3 84

34

side

pang2bian1, 69785 bian1

57

pang2bian1, bian1

89

31

far

yuan3

55

yuan3

5

53

near

jin4, 110232 NPhuman (de) shen1bian1

53

Not found

0

60

like

xiang4…zhe4 233024 yang4, yi2yan g4, zhe4yang4 verb

42

xiang4…yi2y 181 ang4, zhe4yang4, zen3me

Time

for some time you3 yi1 duan4 shi2jian1 Space

Similarity

176837

76665

3

19

Bootstrapping and the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese 49

Where there are multiple lexical exponents given (either in child or adult Mandarin) for an NSM prime, this indicates a case of semantically interchangeable variants or allolexy, because there may be more than one word for the same NSM prime. In addition, when child lexical primes do not exactly match adult lexical primes, one can expect a possible case of “resonance”; that is, the child Mandarin lexical primes may sound or feel different to adult ears. For both child and adult Mandarin, we have (1) tallied the frequency of occurrences of each lexical prime in the data (columns four and seven), as well as (2) ranked lexical primes from the most frequently occurring to the least frequent in relation to the rest of the primes in the NSM inventory (columns five and eight). For child Mandarin, we did this based on the tensubject corpora during the first four years, obviously, whereas for adult Mandarin, we relied on the unpublished, yet nevertheless impressive, lexical survey carried out by the Taiwanese researcher, Shih-Kun Huang (personal communication) in 1994. Huang statistically analysed adult Mandarin corpora from a variety of sources (daily conversation, newspaper, internet, official documents, etc.) that comprised a total of 162.611044 Mandarin words.5 An initial browsing through Table 3 reveals that there is some kind of a correlation between child and adult Mandarin frequencies of lexical primes. To begin with, both child and adult lexical primes for not and I are amongst the most frequent of the NSM primes that can be identified in either languages. Moreover, the following appear among the first 20 most frequently occurring lexical primes in both child and adult Mandarin: yao4 want; zhe4(ge) this; you3 there is/are; you3 have; ni3 you; hao3 good; yi1 one; da4 big; hui4, ke3yi3, neng2, xing2 can; and kan4 see. A more rigorous way of testing the two frequencies for correlation is using statistical means. To do so, we can assign a numeric value against each of the NSM primes based on the frequency of occurrence for the lexical primes in child and adult Mandarin respectively, then we can conduct a Nonparametric Correlations test using what are known as the Kendall Tau B and Spearman Rho Coefficients.6 Here are the results.

50 Adrien Tien Table 4. Statistical correlations between frequencies of occurrences of child

and adult Mandarin lexical primes Child Mandarin

Child Mandarin

Pearson Correlation 1

.526(**)

Sig. (2-tailed)

0.000

N Adult Mandarin

Adult Mandarin

61

Pearson Correlation .526(**) Sig. (2-tailed)

0.000

N

61

61 1 61

Nonparametric Correlations Child Mandarin Adult Mandarin Kendall’s tau_b

Child Mandarin

Adult Mandarin

Spearman’s rho

Child Mandarin

Adult Mandarin

Correlation Coefficient 1.000

.379(**)

Sig. (2-tailed)

.

0.000

N

61

61

Correlation Coefficient .379(**)

1.000

Sig. (2-tailed)

0.000

.

N

61

61

Correlation Coefficient 1.000

.526(**)

Sig. (2-tailed)

.

0.000

N

61

61

Correlation Coefficient .526(**)

1.000

Sig. (2-tailed)

0.000

.

N

61

61

** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).

In statistical terms, the results of the above test indicate a moderately positive correlation between the frequency rankings of child and adult lexical primes, which is highly significant at p=0.01. Translated into “ordinary” language, these results suggest that there is considerable and scientificallyproven correlation between the two frequencies, which is an interesting and remarkable finding. For the present study, this finding comes as a substantial piece of evidence that there is commensurability between the child’s and the adult’s lexico-semantic systems from the perspective of NSM primes. The emergence pattern of lexical primes in child Mandarin had also been examined.

Bootstrapping and the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese 51 Table 5. Stages of the emergence of child Mandarin lexical primes Finalised Finalised rank age range

Emerging child Mandarin lexical primes

1

1;1 – 1;2

yi1 one, er4, liang3 two, hao3 good, da4 big, huai4, bu4 hao3 bad, hai2, duo1, zai4 more; bu4/mei2 le anymore, bu4, mei2 not

2

1;3 – 1;11.28

wo3 I, xiao3 small, hen3, hao3, da4 very, yao4 want, shuo1, jiang3 say, peng4, muo1 touch (contact), zen3(me)/zhe4(me) yang4, you3 happen, you3 there is/are, you3 have

3

1;4 – 2;0.6

ni3 you, (X) hen3/hao3 Y lit. ‘(X) very Y’, jue2de feel. yin1wei4 because, wei4shen2me/gan4ma2 why. xiang4…yi2yang4 like, zhe4yang4 like this, zen3me like what/how

4

1;5 – 1;10.28

shen2me, ta1, dong1xi1, (you3) shi4 (qing2) something/thing/what, zhe4li3 here, xia4mian4, xia4 below

5

1;7 – 1;11

shei2, you3(yi2ge)ren2, ta1, ren2 someone/person/who, (yi2) bu4fen4, Xwhole you3 Ypart part of, zhe4(ge) this, duo1, xu3duo1 many/much, kan4 see, xiang3 think, zhi1dao4 know, hui4, ke3yi3, neng2, xing2 can, na3li3 where, di4fang1 place, na4li3 ‘there’

6

1;8 – 2;0.6

(gen1/xiang4…)yi2yang4, tong2yi1 the same, ting1 hear, hua4/zi4, jiao4 word, jiu4 moment, shang4mian4, shang4 above, li3mian4, li3 inside, pang2bian1, bian1 side

7

1;9 – 1;10

ren2, ren2jia1, ta1men people, dou1, quan2(bu4) all, dong4, ban1 move, yi3hou4, hou4lai2, jiu4, ran2hou4 after

8

1;10 – 1;12

zuo4, nong4 do, si3, zou3 die, ru2guo3/yao4shi4, protasis+de hua4, jiu4 hui4+apodosis if

9

2;0 – 2;10

zhong3, shen2me+NP kind of, shen1ti3, shen1 body, yi2xia4/ yi4hui3(r) a short time, yi3qian2 before, xian4zai4 NOW

10

2;3.18 – 2;10

bie3(de), ling4(wai4), qi2ta1 other, zhe4 xie1, ji3 xie1, (you3) yi4 dian3(dian3), zhe4 ji3 ge some

11

2;7 -2;10

zhen1 (de) true, ke3neng2, hao3xiang4 maybe, shi2hou4 time/when

12

2;9.30

yuan3 far

Not emergent during the live ( alive), a long time, for some time/for how long/near first four years based on data from these 10 subjects

There were roughly 12 stages during which lexical primes emerged, with the timeframes of the stages overlapping. This is deliberate but hardly surprising, for we are dealing with a sample population of subjects rather than one individual subject and, given that children do not all have exactly the

52 Adrien Tien same rate of language development – notwithstanding the similarities that they share – it also follows that lexical primes may all emerge at different points in time for different children. In view of this, each division of stage is delineated by an “upper” (earliest occurrence) and a “lower” (latest occurrence) range of points of time during which a given lexical prime emerges in the ten-subject corpora. The first stage (around 1;1–1;2) represents the earliest period during which some of the lexical primes appear in the corpora (yi1 one, er4, liang3 two, hao3 good, da4 big, huai4, bu4 hao3 bad, hai2, duo1, zai4 more; bu4/mei2 le anymore and bu4, mei2 not), while stage 12 (around 2;9.30) represents possibly the latest period during which the final lexical prime yuan3 far emerged. Between stages 2 and 8, the way the timeframes heavily overlap around the end of the second year indicates that a significant majority of lexical primes appear at somewhere between 1;10 and 1;12 – which turns out to be rather compatible with the timeframe often observed for the so-called ‘word spurt’ phenomenon in child languages (cf. Goldfield and Reznick 1990; Dromi 1987; McShane 1979; Benedict 1979; Nelson 1973, etc.). Last but not least, it is intriguing that the lexical primes live (alive), a long time, for some time/for how long and near do not show up in this particular data set before the fourth birthday. Later on in this chapter, we have attempted to come up with a rationale accounting for the absence of these four lexical primes in child Mandarin corpora. Is there a relationship in child Mandarin between a lexical prime’s frequency ranking and its emergence? Based on our findings, the 23 most frequently occurring lexical primes in child Mandarin emerged not later than stage 5 and, out of these, the following rate both some of the most frequently occurring and amongst the earliest of the lexical primes to emerge: bu4, mei2 not; hao3 good; yi1 one; da4 big; hai2, duo1, zai4 more; bu4/mei2 le anymore; huai4, bu4 hao3 bad; er4, liang3 two; wo3 I; yao4 want; you3 there is/are; you3 have; and, xiao3 small. At the other end of the “scale”, as it were, the 20 least frequently occurring lexical primes also happened to represent some of the latest to emerge, including the following which did not appear in the corpora until stages 11 or 12: bie3(de), ling4(wai4), qi2ta1 other; zhe4 xie1, ji3 xie1, (you3) yi4 dian3(dian3), zhe4 ji3 ge some; si3, zou3 die; (gen1/xiang4…)yi2yang4, tong2yi1 the same; ting1 hear; zhong3, shen2me+NP kind of; yi3qian2 before; ru2guo3 /yao4shi4, protasis+de hua4, jiu4 hui4+apodosis if; yi2xia4/yi4hui3(r) a short time; zhen1 (de) true; yuan3 far; shi2hou4 time/when; and, ke3neng2, hao3xiang4 maybe. A significant relationship between frequency and emergence of lexical primes seems to further substantiate the role of NSM

Bootstrapping and the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese 53

primes in equipping children with the ability to lexico-semantically “bootstrap”. 4. NSM primes as lexical primes, and lexico-syntactic bootstrapping Goddard & Wierzbicka (eds. 2002: 2) claimed that “universal semantic primes have an inherent grammar which is the same in all languages”. Lexical primes in adult Mandarin are testimony to this claim – as Chappell (2002) and (1994) demonstrated – and so too are lexical primes in child Mandarin based on our current corpora, since the syntactic behaviours or combinatorial tendencies of child Mandarin lexical primes, by and large, conform to the syntactic and combinatorial patterns of lexical primes in adult Mandarin and, in turn, the “inherent grammar”. This finding goes some way in substantiating the claim that NSM primes pre-equip or bootstrap children with the semantic foundation necessary to make deductions about the lexico-syntax of the target adult language, Mandarin. Due to space limitation, it is impossible to reproduce the claim and the discussions of Goddard, Wierzbicka, and Chappell (but cf. Goddard and Wierzbicka (ibid, Chapter Two and Chappell ibidem), nor is it practically doable here to detail each and every lexical prime identified in child Mandarin as well as all their combinatorial properties. I have, however, included a nonexhaustive, non-exclusive list of examples offering a glimpse of the kind of typical syntactic combination(s) of each lexical prime that appear in child Mandarin. Table 6. Examples of child Mandarin lexical primes in typical syntactic combinations Child Mandarin lexical prime wo3 I

ni3 you

shei2, you3(yi2ge)ren2, ta1, ren2 someone/person/who

Example Child (1;9.27): wo3 yao4 ni3 jian3 tou2 fa3 ‘I want you to cut (my) hair.’ Child (1;9.6): wo3 da3 ‘I hit (it).’

Comment First person psychological subject

child (1;10): ni3 shuo1 hao3 xiao4 bu4 hao3 xiao4? ‘you tell me, is it funny or not?’ Child (2;6): yi2ge ren2 dai4 zhe mao4zi ‘someone’s wearing a hat’ Child (1;11): yi4 ren2 yi4 zhang1, a1yi2 ‘aunty, one each for one person’

Second person agent combined with speech word shuo1 ‘say’ Indefinite subject

First person agent

Combined with quantifier yi4 ‘one’

54 Adrien Tien Child Mandarin lexical prime shen2me, ta1, dong1xi1, (you3) shi4 (qing2) something/thing/what

ren2, ren2jia1, ta1men people

(yi2) bu4fen4, Xwhole you3 Ypart part of zhong3, shen2me+NP kind of shen1ti3, shen1 body

zhe4(ge) this yi1 one er4, liang3 two duo1, xu3duo1 many/much dou1, quan2(bu4) all

(gen1/xiang4…)yi2yang4, tong2yi1 the same bie3(de), ling4(wai4), qi2ta1 other zhe4 xie1, ji3 xie1, (you3) yi4 dian3(dian3), zhe4 ji3 ge some

hao3 good da4 big

Example Child (2;6): qing3 ni3 gei3 wo3 ba3 na4 ge dong1xi1 gei3 ge shang4 lai2 ‘please give me that thing’ Child (2;6): na4 jing3cha2 ta1 chi1 shen2me a? ‘that policeman, what does he eat?’ Child (2;6): ta1men zhan4...zhe4 xie1 ren2 ‘people stand…some people’

Comment Head noun in indirect object position, combining with modifier na4 ge ‘that’ Question word in patient position of an interrogative sentence Two allolexes of prime, one as an indefinite subject and the other as a modifiable head noun Verb

Child (1;10): xi1gua1 you3 pi2pi2 ‘seeds are a part of the watermelon’ Child (2;8): zhe4 shen2me che1 Interrogative adnominal a? ‘what kind of car is this?’ Child (2;6): ge1ge1 duan4lian4 Patient noun shen1ti3 yi3hou4, bao3zheng4 shen1ti3 hao3 ‘after older brother has exercised his body, it will be guranteed that his body will be fit’ Child (1;9): zhe4 bi2 ‘this nose’ Determiner Child (2;8): nai3nai3 hua4 yi1 ge bai2tu ‘Granny draws one rabbit’ Child (1;11): liang3 ge tian2 quan1quan ‘two donuts’ Child (1;10): hao3 duo1 fei1ji1 ‘many aeroplanes)’ Child (1;10): yun2 dou1 chu1 lai2 you1 ‘all clouds have appeared’ Child (1;10): gen1 yi2yang4 de ‘the same (as the other one)’ Child (2;7): shi4 bie ren2 de ‘(it’s) other people’s’ Child (3;1): yi4 dian3 yi4 dian3, hai3 you3 yi4 dian3 liu2 xie3 ‘(there was) some blood, and it bled a little’ Child (1;10): zhe4yang4 jiu4 hao3 le ‘(it is) good like this’ Child (1;9): hao3 da4! ‘So big!’

Prime with noun classifier in an NP Prime with noun classifier in an NP Attributive stative verb with preceding intensifier Clausal adverb

The thing being compared with (erroneously) omitted Prime modifies noun Prime in adjectival use (with reduplication)

Prime in predicative use Prime in predicative use, preceded by an intensifier

Bootstrapping and the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese 55 Child Mandarin lexical prime huai4, bu4 hao3 bad

Example Child (1;7.28):hui4 huai4 ‘(something) can be bad’

xiao3 small

Child (1;3): xiao3 niao3 ‘a little bird’ Child (1;10): chang2jing3lu4 hao3 gao1 ou! ‘the giraffe is very tall!’ Child (1;3): wo3 yao4 chi1 ‘I want to eat’ Child (1;10): kan4 dao3 zou3 lu4 a ‘(I) see someone walking’

hen3, hao3, da4 very yao4 want kan4 see

Comment Prime in predicative use, combined with modal prime hui4 ‘can’ Prime in attributive use Prime precedes and modifies adjective Prime in equi-clause

si3, zou3 die

Prime with ellipsed nominal object and clausal adjunct Child (1;11): ma1ma1 bu4 Prime combined with zhi1dao4 ‘Mummy doesn’t know psychological subject (it)’ ma1ma1 ‘mummy’ Child (2;7): bie2 de ren2 ting1 Prime with ellipsed bu2 dao4 ‘other people can’t hear nominal object (us)’ Child (1;3): ba4ba shuo1: ___ Prime introduces an ‘Daddy said
____’ indirect quote in the complement slot Child (2;8): zhe4 ge shen2me Prime adnominally zi4? ‘what kind of word is this?’ modified by interrogative pronoun Child (2;7): zhe4 zhen1 de hai2 Prime in predicative use shi4 jia3 de? ‘is this true or false?’ Child (1;9.3): Bu4 muo1 ‘don’t Prime as verb touch (my hair)’ Child (2;9.12): wo3 nong4 Prime as verb …wo3 nong4 zhe4 ge ‘let me do this…let me do this’ Child (1;10): yi3ba1 hui4 dong4 Prime as verb, combined ‘the tail can move’ with modal verb hui4 ‘can’ Child (2;10): ku4zi you3 shi4 Prime as verb, typically mei2 you3? ‘did something combined with object happen to the pants?’ shi4 ‘something’ Child (1;10): hai2 you3 Prime as verb with tang2guo3 ‘there are also lollies’ preceding augmentor Child (2;8): wo3 hai2 you3 yi2 Prime as verb with bu4 xin1 che1zi ‘I still have preceding augmentor another new car’ Child (2;11): ta1 si3 la ‘it died’ Prime as stative verb

Live (alive)

Not available

zhi1dao4 know

ting1 hear

shuo1, jiang3 say

hua4/zi4, jiao4 word

zhen1 (de) true peng4, muo1 touch (contact) zuo4, nong4 do

dong4, ban1 move

zen3(me)/zhe4(me) yang4, you3 happen you3 there is/are you3 have

Not applicable

56 Adrien Tien Child Mandarin lexical prime hai2, duo1, zai4more; bu4/mei2 le anymore

Example Child (1;9.6): hai2 chang4 ge ‘(I) want to sing more’ Child (1;10): zai4 lai2 yi1 bei ‘have one more (cup)’ bu4, mei2 not Child (1;10): zhe4 bei1 bu2 re4 a ‘this cup (of water) is not hot’ Child (1;10): mei2 you3 yong4 guo4 ‘(It) has not been used’’ hui4, ke3yi3, neng2, xing2 can Child (1;9.3): jia2 zhe4 bu4 xing1 ‘(you) can’t carry (it)’ ru2guo3/yao4shi4, protasis+de Child (2;6): ma1ma1, ru2guo3 hua4, jiu4 hui4+apodosis if ni3 da3 wo3 pi4gu3, wo3 dou1 bu4 gan3 lai2 da3 ni3 ‘Mummy, if you smack my bum, I never dare hitting you back’ ke3neng2, hao3xiang4 maybe Child (2;7): ke3neng2 shi4 da4 che1 ‘maybe it’s a big car’ yin1wei4 because, Child (2;6): wei4shen2me chi1 wei4shen2me/gan4ma2 why huai4 ren2? ‘why does (it) eat bad people?’

Comment Prime modifies VP Prime modifies sentence Prime precedes and modifies adjective Prime as imperfective Prime combined with verb jia2 ‘carry’ Prime occurs sentenceinitially in front of the protasis clause of a biclausal construction Prime as clausal operator in clause-initial position Prime as question word in interrogative sentence which already states the consequence Prime as verbal classifier in postverbal position

yi2xia4/yi4hui3(r) a short time Child (2;10): ma1ma1 deng3 yi2xia4 hui4 hui2 lai2 de ‘mummy will be back after a short while’ yi3qian2 before Child (2;6): yi3qian2 xiang4 wo3 Prime as adverb in chuan1 de yi1fu2 ‘like the monoclause, with clothes I wore before (this time)’’ reference time being ‘this time’ (time of speaking) yi3hou4, hou4lai2, jiu4, Child (2;10): ran2hou4 tu4diiao4 Prime as adverb in ran2hou4 after shui3 ma ‘spit out the water monoclause, with afterwards’ reference time being the implied event that took place previously shi2hou4 time/when Child (2;10): ma1ma1 na4 Prime as clausal adjunct shi2hou4 hui2 lai2 le? ‘so what if of time, combining with mummy comes back at that determiner na4 ‘that’ time?’ A long time Not available Not applicable xian4zai4 now

Child (2;6): xian4zai4 nian2ji4 da4 le ‘now (grandpa) is getting on with age’

Prime as temporal adjunct in clause-initial position, referring to a current period of time

Bootstrapping and the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese 57 Child Mandarin lexical prime jiu4 moment

Example Child (2;6): ni3 zhao4 lai2 zhao4 qu4 de ta1 jiu4 bian4 cheng2 zhao4pian4 le ‘You take a photo here and there and photos turn up in an instant’ Not available

Comment Prime occurs with the change-of-state verb bian4 ‘change’ most of the time, if not all the time Not applicable

Child (1;9.6): na3li3 huang2? ‘where is it yellow (in colour)?’ Child (1;9.3): fang4 zhe4li3 ‘put (it) here’ Child (2;7): zhe4 xia4mian1 ‘this is below’

near

Child (3;1): zhu4 zai4 na4 ge3 hao3 yuan3 hao3 yuan3 na4 ‘live in that very, very far (place) there’ Not available

Prime as interrogative word Prime as locative adjunct Prime in locative adjunct with (erroneously) omitted locational noun Prime in locative adjunct with implied locational noun Prime combined with existential verb you3 ‘there is/are’ Prime combined with locative specifier you4 ‘right’ predicative locative Prime used without marking out the locus in ablative Not applicable

xiang4…yi2yang4 like, zhe4yang4 like this, zen3me like what/how

Child (2;10): hai2 shi4 zhe4yang4 gai4 qi3 lai2 ‘still build it up like this’

Prime occurring in the adverbial slot and used as a clausal adjunct

For some time/for how long na3li3 where, di4fang1 place, na4li3 ‘there’ zhe4li3 here xia4mian4, xia4 below

shang4mian4, shang4 above

li3mian4, li3 inside

pang2bian1, bian1 side

yuan3 far

Child (2;9.30): wo3 kan4 dao4, zai4 shang4mian4 ‘I can see it, (it’s) above’ Child (2;7): ji4suan4ji1 li3mian4 you3 ‘there’s one inside the alculator’ Child (2;7): zhe4 shi4 you4 bian1 ‘this is on the right-hand side’

The following paragraphs in this section have concentrated on child Mandarin lexical primes whose combinatorial patterns seem to pose some concern to the inherent grammar claim: feel, do, far, moment, before, live (alive), near, a long time and for some time/for how long. Goddard (1998: 339) asserted that “the verb do is found early, as are ‘actor-action’ patterns”. But in Goddard (2001: 200), he made the qualification that “though the word do appears early in the third year, it is a long time before the child is able to use it with the full range of complement and valency options”. The current finding in child Mandarin is that the exponents zuo4 and nong4 do are present during the first four years though, in production, not all the proposed valency options are attested in child Mandarin. The expressed valency options involving this prime include do some-

58 Adrien Tien thing, do something with someone (“comitative”), do something with something (“instrumental”) and do something (good) for someone (“benefactive”). The apparently inexpressible valency option during the first four years in Mandarin acquisition is do something to someone. The only way that this valency option (do to) can be accounted for in child Mandarin is implicitly; typically via a Verb-Complement construction (where the Complement is a resultative verb complement; for example, -si3 in ta1 ba3 ta1 nong4 si3 le [3SG Cov 3SG do die Perf] roughly, ‘(it) did something (to the rabbit so that the rabbit) dies’ at 2;11 years. This construction semantically incorporates the action of ‘doing something to someone/something’ as the first of two causally linked events. This is, in fact, a typical kind of causative construction in Mandarin which focuses on the result arising from a given event or situation, with the causative relation between the result and the event/situation being inferred rather than formally expressed. The inexpressibility of this valency option do to in early production is a cause for concern because, firstly, the NSM theory stipulates that all languages are able to formally verbalise this valency option and, secondly, it has been the NSM view that a do to sentence only stands for one single event without necessarily having to be linked with another (say, in a causal scenario) (see Wierzbicka 1996: 122). This issue warrants further investigation. The prime feel is of significant interest because it appears to be phrasally, rather than lexically, expounded during the first four years. The way that this prime is dealt with in child Mandarin is, essentially, via the copular structure, (X) hen3/hao3 Y lit. [(X) very/very Y] ‘X feels Y’. For instance, ta1 hao3 nan2guo4… ku1 le [3SG very sad…cry Perf] ‘she felt sad…(she) cried’ at 2,6 years. This structure takes care of posited universal configurations such as ‘X feels something good’ or ‘X feels something like this’ but not ones such as ‘X feels something good towards Z’. Configurations of the latter kind seem to be implicitly, rather than explicitly, conveyed through semantically complex emotive predicates, such as xi3huan1 ‘like’. Nonetheless, the absence of any real lexical exponent of feel in child Mandarin in the sample population would be seen as a challenge to this semantic prime and, in turn, the NSM model. The status of the spatial prime far is rather weak in child Mandarin, primarily because its lexical prime does not exhibit a similar syntactic pattern to that of its counterpart in adult Mandarin. The main concern with the syntax of yuan3 far in child Mandarin is that its NPlocus is invariably ellipsed (as in the following example with the omitted NPlocus, zhe4li3 ‘here’ in, zhu4 zai4 na4 ge li2 zhe4li3 hao3 yuan3 hao3 yuan3 na4 ‘(aunty) lives in that very, very far (place) there from here’):

Bootstrapping and the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese 59

(1) Adult:

ni3 gu1gu1 zhu4 zai4 na3? 2SG aunty live Loc where ‘Where does your aunty live?’

Child (3;1) zhu4 zai4 na4 ge hao3 yuan3 hao3 yuan3 na4 live Loc that CL very far very far there ‘Live in that very, very far (place) there.’ Though yi3qian2 seems to expound the prime before in child Mandarin as it does in adult Mandarin, the troubling aspect with this exponent is that, in child Mandarin, yi3qian2 appears to function exclusively adverbially in an independent monoclausal sentence, and the time of speaking always seems to be implicitly involved as an inherent reference time. This means that yi3qian2 effectively means before (this time) in child Mandarin. While before this time has been recognised as an important aspect of the universal combinatorics of before (cf. Goddard and Wierzbicka 2002: 68–70, Vol. I), the ramification of the situation is that yi3qian2 in child Mandarin probably does not permit the expression of before in canonical sentences such as ‘this happened before I saw you’ and ‘you were born before I was born’ (whose event information structure does not involve the time of speaking as a relevant reference time; see Wierzbicka 1996: 133). The overall implication is that, even if yi3qian2 is indeed the rightful exponent of before in child Mandarin, its status, owing to its somewhat rigid event information structure as just described, requires further probing. With the prime moment, it appears that its combinatorial possibilities are rather restricted in child Mandarin, since the exponent of the prime moment, jiu4, always appears to precede the process or change-of-state verb bian4 ‘change, transform, become’. My explanation is that the way the exponents combine in the production data merely reflects a topical interest at the time of development. Perhaps there should be no surprise that process or change-of-state events are perceptually salient and interesting to young children when it comes to something that occurs suddenly or spontaneously. The question, however, remains whether or not young children really have access to all the combinatorial possibilities of the lexical prime moment that are available in adult Mandarin. Probably the thorniest issue here is that there seems to be no lexical exponents in child Mandarin for live (alive), near, a long time and for some time/for how long from our sample population. But does this mean that these NSM primes have, so to speak, “no foothold” in the child’s mind at all? Not necessarily. In the next section, it is argued that it is just as real for an NSM prime to appear as a conceptual prime as it may be represented by

60 Adrien Tien a lexical prime. A tentative reason, which is perceptual “non-salience”, may explain why lexical counterparts had not yet appeared for these primes. When something or someone is sufficiently “near” an entity, it might be more relevant perceptually to the child to pinpoint its location as being on one side, above or below etc. of that entity. When a living entity has gone on breathing and continued to be “alive”, this, intuitively, may not in itself be anything captivating or comment-worthy (as opposed to when a living entity “dies”, which would be more noteworthy and worth talking about, as children do). And when an event or action etc. has occurred over a period of time, or when a living entity has “lived” for a period of time – even for a long time – this again may not be sufficiently interesting to capture a child’s attention and, in turn, her/his urge to talk about it. In fact, how long a span of time really is can be an entirely subjective judgement dependent on a person’s perspective and, in the case of children, it isn’t inconceivable that there may not be a marked difference for them between a time span that is considered (by adults to be) a “long time” and one that is considered (again by adults to be) “for some time” i.e. not necessarily a long time or a short time. But perceptual non-salience and subsequent failure to talk about something in production do not necessarily equate non-acquisition and/or nonunderstanding of these concepts related to space, time and “being alive”. These concepts are probably implicitly conveyed, couched in the meanings of other words or structures in child language. For instance, when a child comments on something (e.g. a family pet) having “passed away”, this is an indication that s/he was previously aware of it having “lived”. And if a child utters the word deng3 ‘wait’ as s/he had had to wait up on someone (e.g. a child waiting for her/his father to finish reading his newspaper so that s/he can play with him), practical experience tells us that there is reason to believe that for some time or even a long time is embedded in the meaning of this semantically complex verb. I have more to say about this in the final sections of this chapter. 5. NSM primes as conceptual primes, and lexico-semantic bootstrapping Lexical primes, of course, are not all that there is in the early vocabulary of Mandarin-speaking children; in fact, far from that. Children’s lexicon even from the emergence of the very first words comprises a great many semantically complex, i.e. non-prime, words. Since it obviously isn’t possible to

Bootstrapping and the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese 61

discuss each and every one of the non-primes given, what I have done in the following paragraphs is to examine selected non-prime words so as to demonstrate how conceptual primes in child Mandarin are at play and how they go hand-in-hand with lexical primes in the same language. This, in turn, lends further support to the idea that lexico-bootstrapping may be accounted for by NSM primes. First of all, it needs to be recalled that conceptual primes are NSM primes implicitly and conceptually represented in semantically complex words. Analysing the meanings of non-prime words should, therefore, uncover the presence of conceptual primes as core semantic components. For instance, a child aged 2,6 years in the data was particularly fascinated by pilots. It is, therefore, understandable that the word fei1xing2yuan3 ‘pilot’ should have not only entered into his vocabulary but appeared frequently. To this child, fei1xing2yuan2 is someone who he could look up to, who could do everything – in particular, fly a plane – and who he wanted to be. So a tentative (non-conclusive) analysis of the meaning of fei1xing2yuan2 should go tentatively along the lines of: (2) Fei1xing2yuan2 ‘pilot’ = a kind of person this person can do everything this person can fly (a plane)7 I want to be like this person Based on this analysis, we can identify someone/person/who, kind of, this, can, do all and something/thing/what (= “everything” in English as a portmanteau form), want, like as conceptual primes in the semantically complex meaning of fei1xing2yuan2. Here are three other non-prime words in child Mandarin whose child-unique meanings, upon analysis, reveal configuration of many conceptual primes (note that the analyses are very tentative and non-conclusive): (3) Deng3 ‘wait’ = when something happens like this, X have to be in this place for some time Typical context: A child waits for a parent to finish doing something (e.g. shopping or reading), or for a series of events to finish unfolding (e.g. plots in a story). Someone (X), typically the child her/himself, has to remain somewhere for a period of time (conceptual primes revealed = time/when, something/thing/what, happen, like, this, place, for some time, have to). (4) Ge2bi4 ‘neighbouring’ = X is on one side of Y, near Y

62 Adrien Tien Typical context: A person (X) sits somewhere close on one side of another person (Y) (conceptual primes revealed = someone/person/who/one, side, near). (5) Man4 ‘slow’ = X is moving for a long time Typical context: An entity (e.g. a turtle, a car, a person etc.) manoeuvrering at (what the child considers to be) an exceedingly slow rate. (Conceptual primes revealed = move, for a long time) Importantly, these examples show that, even in the absence of lexical primes for near, for some time,/for how long and a long time during the first four years, a scrutiny of the meanings of non-prime words such as ge2bi4, deng3, and man4 attest to the existence of corresponding conceptual primes. In other words, the NSM primes near, a long time and for some time/for how long do, after all, have conceptual “foothold” in the child’s mind. Since we already know the situation with lexical primes in child Mandarin, the logical question here should then be, whether an NSM prime first appears in child Mandarin as a lexical prime or a conceptual prime, given that there is no difference between them at all except that one is an NSM prime manifested in production and the other an NSM prime manifested in conceptualisation. There are three possible scenarios in response to this question: (A) A lexical prime appears before a conceptual prime if the same given NSM prime is represented in production before it is also found conceptually “couched” in the semantically complex meaning of a word; or (B) A conceptual prime appears before a lexical prime if the same NSM prime is implicitly embedded as a conceptual constituent in the semantically complex meaning of a word before its lexical counterpart appears in production. This scenario – or phenomenon – has a special term known as “latency” (following Tien 1999); and (C) A lexical prime and a conceptual prime appear at the same time if the same given NSM prime is represented in production as well as conceptually in the meaning of a non-prime word at roughly the same point in language development. According to our present child Mandarin corpora, all three scenarios are entirely likely. Let us first consider scenario (C) using a real-life example in which the child used si3 ‘die’ at 2,11 years both as a semantically primitive

Bootstrapping and the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese 63

verb corresponding to die i.e. si3 as lexical prime die (ta1 si3 la ‘it (the rabbit) died’) and as a semantically complex resultative verb complement si3 in ta1 ba3 ta1 nong4 si3 le roughly, ‘(it) did something to it (the rabbit) so that it (the rabbit) dies’) whose meaning conveyed a “cause” component (it did something to the rabbit) and an end “result” or “effect” component (because of this, the rabbit died). This example illustrates how two obviously related though different senses of si3 were used to its full advantage by the child, not only at the same point in language development but in fact during the same conversation topic (i.e. how the rabbit got killed and died). Use of the verb complement -si3 seems to reinforce the idea of “death” by elaborating on how and why the rabbit died (which, as just described, is achieved by the cause and effect components in the meaning of the –si3 complement). Thus, it is not surprising that, apart from the conceptual prime die which is embedded in the “effect” component, there should be a host of other supporting conceptual primes as well, not least do, someone/person/who, because and this in –si3’s non-primitive meaning. It is, of course, foreseeable that an NSM prime appears in production first, as did the lexical prime wo3 I, which emerged before the same NSM prime is founded couched in the meaning of related but semantically more complex words, such as the reflexive non-prime zi4ji3 ‘self’. This is what scenario (A) is all about. Here is one such example: (6) Child (1;9,27):

Zi4ji3 da3. Self hit ‘(I’ll) hit (it) myself’

As seen in Table Five previously, the lexical prime wo3 I is among the earliest lexical primes to emerge in child Mandarin, at stage two or as early as 1,3 years. It makes sense intuitively that the NSM prime I should be lexically represented first as it is, presumably, a very handy” word to have to any child (and here we may recall Piaget’s well-known contention about child’s initially egocentric perspective of the world particularly during the first two years of life; see Piaget 1954 and 1929). While a non-prime word such as zi4ji3 also evolves around the idea of I, it involves more complex, additional ideas and concepts about (roughly speaking) “selfhood” etc. that the child are yet to master, not only conceptually but also cognitively. As a case in point, zi4ji3 in the above example seems to assume the meaning along the line of, minimally, “I am going to do this (hitting), not someone else”. This (very preliminary) analysis indicates not only that the NSM prime I is indexed in the meaning of zi4ji3 as a conceptual prime but, even

64 Adrien Tien more interestingly, the observation that the child has begun to fine-tune her idea of egocentrism and/or selfhood by making a contrast between who does what i.e. it is “I” who will do it, not another “person”, in configuration with supporting conceptual elements such as do, this, someone/person/who and other. Nevertheless, given the semantic complexity of zi4ji3, it is both understandable and expected that this child wouldn’t have acquired it before the much simpler – in fact semantically primitive – word wo3 I. I have left scenario (B) last because this is the one that probably needed most discussion. Even though live (alive) has no lexical prime in our child Mandarin data during the first four years, it is, nevertheless, conceptually evident in the meanings of at least two semantically complex words: zhu4 ‘dwell, reside, live (some place)’ and nian2ji4 da4 [age big] ‘old age, aged, to get on with age’. Here is an example (as well as example (1) earlier): (7) Child (2;6): ge1ge1 gei3 di4di4 dang1zuo4 yi2 older brother Cov younger brother set out to be one

ge CL

hao3 hai1zi yi3 shi4 dang1 le ge fei1xing2yuan2 le. good child so suitable become Perf CL pilot Perf ge1ge yi4 hui jia1 cai2 nian2ji4 da4 le. older brother CL return home then age old Perf ‘Older brother sets a good example for younger brother by being a good child and has been suitable to be a pilot, older brother gets old when he returns home.’ Even though sentence at (7) reads slightly odd from an adult’s perspective, it, nonetheless, appears quite clear what nian2ji4 da4 means – that he (the child herself) would get on with age if he were to leave home for some time or even for a long time to be a pilot. And time is, in a large part, what “ageing” is all about. Thus, it seems to me reasonable to attribute to nian2ji4 da4 the following (tentative) semantic explication: “this person has lived for some time/a long time. After this (time), this person is not the same anymore (i.e. not young anymore)” (cf. Wierzbicka 1996: 86 for a definition of old in adult English in the context of these people are old). As for example (1), the idea that zhu4 involves residing somewhere – in this case, that “somewhere” is apparently very far away – and the connection with a spatial adjunct is further testimony that the child had grasped the meaning of zhu4 the way do Mandarin-speaking adults. Based on this observation, it can be surmised that the semantic composition of zhu4 contained some-

Bootstrapping and the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese 65

thing to this effect: “this person has lived in this place (for some time)” (it is not certain whether “for some time” should constitute part of the child’s understanding of the meaning of zhu4 since it cannot be taken for granted that children realise that to “reside” somewhere means to be living there over a period of time). What the (preliminary and incomplete) explications of nian2ji4 da4 and zhu4 demonstrate is that the NSM prime live (alive) exists before the end of the fourth year as a conceptual prime, albeit that its lexical exponent is not yet found in the data and would probably only appear later on. And this is where the notion of “latency” comes in – a conceptual prime is as semantically valid and real as is a lexical prime since the former is the realization of a given NSM prime’s linguistic potential in conceptualization, no less than the latter is the realization of the same given NSM prime’s linguistic potential in production. And latency captures the essence of lexicosemantic bootstrapping from the NSM perspective – to the extent that we can accept that the meanings of non-prime words are made up of semantic and conceptual building blocks, NSM primes bootstrap the meaning of a non-prime word by providing (or being) those very semantic/conceptual building blocks. In this sense, NSM primes form a conceptual prerequisite of the meaning of a non-prime word. While NSM semantic/conceptual building blocks are just as crucial to bootstrapping their actual lexical exponents in production, it is possible that at least some of these lexical exponents emerge later on in development. In subscribing to the idea of latency and how NSM primes bootstrap lexical/conceptual primes, a question one might well immediately raise is this: if NSM primes are supposed to be pre-existing and possibly innate, then shouldn’t they all be there from the very beginning or, at the very least, be evident at the same time in language development? It is useful to level the same question at the physical facility of walking. Though walking (with the legs) is an innate ability to homo sapiens, obviously even the staunchest primatologist would not insist that human beings are walking at birth, whether phylogenetically or ontogenetically. After all, there needs to be a period of transition or progression so that the appropriate motor neurons and neur(on)al networks can be developed, muscular and skeletal structures strengthened and, bodily control and balance coordinated. Hence, in a way, walking may be seen as a latent facility because the potential to walk is there from the beginning. Looking at this situation from a bootstrapping perspective, while human beings are innately bootstrapped for the ability to walk, this just means that the potential or latency is there for a person to grow up walking. Having this potential doesn’t mean that a

66 Adrien Tien person is born walking and, even in every stage of development towards being able to walk, a child grasps many other physical and physiological functions etc. before s/he actually takes that first step. Moreover, there may be a host of intervening variables that affect the length of time it takes before the child takes the first steps. Returning now to the question earlier, while every child is pre-equipped or bootstrapped with the potential to enter into the lexico-semantics of the target adult language by means of the NSM primes, that potential needs to be realised, and this depends on a number of variables. In turn, these variables may play a role in how soon/late an NSM prime emerges in child language and in whether an NSM prime first makes an appearance as a lexical or conceptual prime. One such variable may be perceptual salience (versus non-salience), and I already touched briefly earlier in my discussion on live (alive). Si3 ‘die’ appears at a given point in development both as a lexical and conceptual prime because, I contend, a living entity that is no longer alive comes across as perceptually obvious – maybe even a bit of a shock – to the child, so this phenomenon has captured enough of the child’s attention to warrant talking about it in every way. And if we examine some of the earliest emerging lexical primes in child Mandarin, it s not difficult to see that quite a few relate to attributes or features of something that is perceptually eye-catching e.g. hao3 good, da4 big, huai4, bu4 hao3 bad, xiao3 small, hen3, hao3 and da4 very. But salience (or non-salience) can be functional, too, rather than perceptual. Presumably, words such as bu4, mei2 not, yao4 want, hai2, duo1, zai4 more; bu4/mei2 le anymore and peng4, muo1 touch (contact) emerge early because it is important (in terms of survival?) to want or not want something, to ask for more of something, or to be in direct physical contact with a family pet or a soft toy by touching it. Functional salience and usefulness play just as an important part in the emergence of conceptual primes in non-prime words. As Goddard (1998: 254, citing Miller 1956) argued, “semantic complexes packaged into word-like ‘chunks’ make it easier for people to acquire and manipulate the huge amounts of semantic information involved”. If “ease of manipulation” and functional relevance are important determining factors when it comes to choosing which bit of information one should try and convey in word learning first, then having non-prime words such as zhu4 ‘reside, dwell, live (in a place)” and nian2ji4 da4 ‘aged, to get on with age, to get old’ should surely be easier to manipulate and functionally more useful than the lexical prime sheng1huo2/huo2 live (alive) in the target language, since there is more interesting information “packaged” into zhu4 and nian2ji4

Bootstrapping and the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese 67

da4 than sheng1huo2/huo2 with the mere fact that an entity lives or is living/alive. Adult input may also play a vital role in determining why some NSM primes first emerge as lexical/conceptual primes. Tables 8, 9 and 10 already demonstrated that there is a significant relationship between the frequencies of child and adult Mandarin lexical primes. A plausible explanation for this is that the more frequently a child hears a given lexical prime featured in the input, adult Mandarin, the more likely s/he is also going to use that lexical prime frequently in her/his output speech. Last but not least, developmental factor may also be a variable (cf. also Goddard 2001: 217). Earlier it had already been speculated that perhaps having the lexical prime wo3 I in the earliest stages of development might be more within the child’s cognitive grasp and her/his initial tendencies about egocentrism, rather than a word such as zi4ji3 ‘self’ which packages in it probably more information than the child would bargain for i.e. it takes a child who is more cognitively developed and who has a more “mature” idea about egocentrism to properly make use of the information conveyed by zi4ji3. The main premise I wish to put forward here is that it is or should be within our expectation that not all NSM primes emerge at the same rate and in the same manifestation in child language, even though they may be inborn and provide the lexico-semantic bootstrapping mechanism, for there can be a great many intervening variables that come into play as the child gets on with language acquisition process. 6. Conclusion The findings and observations in this chapter provided important evidence that NSM primes are existent in child Mandarin during the first four years, represented either lexically or conceptually, and that the universal combinations of NSM primes have found verification, by and large, in child Mandarin lexical primes. A few of child Mandarin lexical primes cause some concern, and the extent of the concern differed from one prime to another; however in all the cases the concern generally had to do with either (1) the apparently restricted range of combinations of the child’s lexical exponent, or (2) children did not seem to have a lexical exponent for the NSM prime, let alone how it would combine syntactically. The concerns, in fact, reflect children’s linguistic competence and calibre from even an early age, in my opinion. It is not necessarily that children could not express a prime in production (concern 2) or that they did not

68 Adrien Tien know how to use a lexical prime in combinations the way adults do in Mandarin or universally (concern 1). It is just that – so it appears – children had their own rationale for acquiring the words that they did and their own way of putting words together in sentences. When examined closely, it seems that children had actually explored and exploited syntactically and semantically more advanced options of communicating than what NSM primes and their combinatorial grammar alone allow i.e. though the NSM is a universal and semantically simple system, children probably felt it too simple some of the time for them to convey across the semantically more complex yet interesting information that they might want to package into many of their early words and sentences. So perhaps it is not that the universal do to “patient” valency option was unknown to young children but, rather, that it just came across as more interesting and worthwhile to young children to use the semantically more “sophisticated” syntactic structure that involved, say, the resultative verb complement structure – in spite that the structure is syntactically more complex and language-specific. Similarly, it makes sense that NSM primes such as for a long time and live (alive) should first emerge not as lexical primes but as conceptual primes embedded in the meanings of semantically complex non-prime words such as man4 ‘slow’ and zhu4 ‘live’ or nian2ji4 da4 ‘aged, to get old, to get on with age’, since these non-prime words had neatly packaged into them some of the more interesting things that children would like to communicate across, such as how a turtle, a snail or a car travels ever so slowly and takes up a lot of time, instead of just saying ‘for a long time’; how a person known to the child might reside in a place and the child has found interesting things to say about that place – that it is very far away etc. – instead of just commenting on the mere fact that that person ‘lives’ or ‘is living /alive’; and, how a person might turn old or age after events or periods in life – like imagining coming home after having been away being a pilot – which are far pertinent things to talk about from a child’s perspective than simply saying that someone ‘lives/is living’. In short, children’s communicative intent and content provided a great impetus in determining what words and sentences children acquired first; communicative function of words/sentences, therefore, is also an important variable in lexical, syntactic and semantic development. As discussed in the chapter, there are possibly a number of variables that affect children’s linguistic development, not only communicative needs, and these have played a role in whether an NSM prime first appears as a lexical or conceptual prime, or gets represented both lexically and conceptually at the same time. The issue of latency arose as a direct result of

Bootstrapping and the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese 69

variables at play. But it is in fact due to such issues as latency and developmental variables that the child’s lexical, syntactic and semantic potential has come to the fore, for it seems that children are bootstrapped to acquire the lexico-syntax and the lexico-semantics of the language no matter what variables there might be. In the opening paragraphs of this chapter, I mentioned the idea of the child’s semantic system being commensurable with the adult’s semantic system, and how this system goes hand-in-hand in with establishing developmental continuity as far as lexico-semantic and lexico-syntactic development are concerned. While commensurability and continuity are not necessarily equivalent, having a semantic system that is commensurable with another certainly appears more beneficial and promising to language development in terms of continuity than having two systems that are radically different. It is not unreasonable to assume that the children’s system is compatible with the adults’ since children grow up to be adults, after all; as well, there is a universally observable pattern based on which most children more or less conform to as they go through the developmental stages. Speaking of “universality”, it isn’t inconceivable to postulate the NSM system as that which accounts for universal commensurability since NSM primes is “carved out of the natural language”, as Wierzbicka (1988: 9) famously put it. To the extent that child Mandarin – and child languages, in general – is/are a natural language (s) every bit as is adult Mandarin (or any adult language), there seems to be no reason why the NSM system couldn’t be applicable to child Mandarin (or any child language), too. NSM primes bootstrap lexico-semantic development in that they furnish children with the potential to tap into the semantics of the adult lexicon – whether a lexical item be semantically primitive or complex. Children need conceptual primes as semantic components in the meanings of semantically complex non-prime words so that they can continue to make adjustments and amendments to their meanings – that is, until the meanings of those non-prime words become something more or less like what the meanings of the same words are like in the target adult language. Lexical primes and their combinatorial grammar, on the other hand, provide children with the inherent ability to organise words and sentences, presumably starting with the simplest and universal combinations, then progressing towards the more advanced structures that are more adult-like and specific to the language, even if it isn’t always possible to see how children progress from stage to stage every step of the way – and it isn’t inconceivable sometimes for children to skip from the simpler stages directly to a more advanced stage of syntactic development, as they did in the case of the “patient” valency op-

70 Adrien Tien tion for the prime do. While an NSM account of lexico-semantic and lexico-syntactic bootstrapping offers an entirely novel approach, it does, by all means, shed new light on the theory of bootstrapping in general.

Acknowledgement I wish to express my gratitude to my university, the National University of Singapore (NUS) and, in particular, my home faculty, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, for their support in the way of the Start-Up Grant. This chapter could not have come to fruition without their support. Notes 1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_%28computing%29 I would like to express my gratitude to CHILDES, Professor J. H. Hsu of the Fujen Catholic University and Professor J. J. P. Tse of the National Taiwan Normal University for kindly making the corpora available to me. Notational conventions: Cov Coverb 1/2/3/4 Tonal markers (first tone/second tone/third tone/fourth tone; these are numerals that appear after syllables) “” Quoting someone verbatim or highlighting text for emphasis abcd Italics generally for in-text Mandarin words but also for highlighting text for emphasis Based on Shih-Kun Huang’s 1994 corpus of adult Mandarin, comprising a total of 162,611,044 words. Since Huang’s survey was not conducted within the NSM framework, it most likely did not take into account issues such as allolexy and polysemy. Nevertheless, data from this survey still seems to me most valuable and worthwhile for the sake of comparison with child Mandarin data. Even though no child Mandarin lexical primes were identified for live (alive), near, a long time/for how long and for some time, I had assigned each of these a “zero” frequency value and the last four places in frequency ranking so as to be able to proceed with child-adult frequency comparisons. The components fly and plane are not part of the NSM inventory. They have been used only as a temporary measure, and indeed these are themselves semantically complex and requiring explication. It should be noted that fly is accepted as a “semantic molecule”, which is, essentially, a “simple (though not primitive)” word; see Goddard (1998: 254–255) for further details.

Bootstrapping and the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese 71

References Benedict, Helen 1979 Early lexical development: Comprehension and production. Journal of Child Language 6: 183–200. Bigg, Penny 2002 The ‘I’s have it: Semantic milestones. Unpublished Honours Thesis. Armidale, University of New England. Bowerman, Melissa 1985 What shapes children’s grammars? In: Dan I. Slobin (ed.), The cross-linguistic study of language acquisition. Volume II: Theoretical issues, 1257–1320. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Chappell, Hilary 1994 Mandarin semantic primitives. In: Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka (eds.), Semantic and lexical universals: Theory and empirical findings, 109–147. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Chappell, Hilary 2002 The syntax of universal semantic primes in Mandarin Chinese. In: Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka (eds.), Meaning and universal grammar: Theory and empirical findings. Volume I. 243–322. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Crystal, David 1997 A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Dromi, Esther 1987 Early lexical development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goddard, Cliff 1998 Semantic analysis: A practical introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goddard, Cliff 2001 Conceptual primes in early language development. In: Martin Pütz, Susanne Niemeier, and Rene Dirven (eds.), Applied cognitive linguistics I: Theory and language acquisition, 193–227. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Goddard, Cliff 2003 The natural semantic metalanguage homepage. http://www.une. edu.au/arts/LCL/disciplines/linguistics/nsmpage1.htm#model. (updated August 2003, accessed November 2004). Goddard, Cliff and Anna Wierzbicka (eds.) 2002 Meaning and universal grammar: Theory and empirical findings. Volumes I & II. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Goldfield, Beverly A. and J. Steven Reznick 1990 Early lexical acquisition: Rate, content, and the vocabulary spurt. Journal of Child Language 17: 171–183.

72 Adrien Tien Karmiloff-Smith, Annette 1992 Beyond modularity: A developmental perspective on cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. McShane, John 1979 The development of naming. Linguistics 17: 879–905. Nelson, Katherine 1973 Structure and strategy in learning to talk. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 38. Oxford: Blackwell. Piaget, Jean 1929 The child’s conception of the world. London: Routledge and Paul Kegan. Piaget, Jean 1954 The construction of reality in the child. New York: Basic Books. Pinker, Steven 1987 The bootstrapping problem in language acquisition. In: Brian MacWhinney (ed.), Mechanisms of language acquisition, 399–441. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Siskind, Jeffrey M. 2002 Learning word-to-meaning mappings. In: Peter Broeder and Jaap Murre (eds.), Models of language acquisition: Inductive and deductive approaches, 121–153. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Snedeker, Jesse and Lila R. Gleitman 2004 Why it is hard to label our concepts. In: Geoffrey D. Hall and Sandra R. Waxman (eds.), Weaving a lexicon, 257–293. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Tien, Adrian 1999 Early lexical exponents and ‘related’ lexical items as manifestation of conceptual/semantic primitives in child language. Unpublished MA Thesis. Canberra, Australian National University. Wierzbicka, Anna 1988 The semantics of grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Wierzbicka, Anna 1995 Universal semantic primitives as a tool for the study of language acquisition. Unpublished ms. Canberra, Australian National University. Wierzbicka, Anna 1996 Semantics: primes and universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis and conventionality: a crosslinguistic study on verb acquisition by Chinese Mandarin- and Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children Maria-Alice Parente, Aline Villavicencio, Maity Siqueira, Ping Chen and Lauren Tonietto

This chapter addresses within-domain bootstrapping. The Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis focuses on two mechanisms of lexical-semantic acquisition: (i) identification and use of phonological strings (labels), and (ii) pragmatic development in learning the conventional meanings of verbs. Two cross-linguistic studies illustrate the intricacies between these two mechanisms when children develop strategies to manage the lexical semantic system of their language. The first study compares the performance of 39 Chinese- and 40 Portuguese-speaking children aged 37 to 49 months in a naming task. Chinese-speaking children produce more action labels and more specific verbs than Portuguese-speaking children. However, both linguistic groups show the same level of conventionality, which is, proper word use from semantic and/or pragmatic perspectives. In the second study, we generate graphs for the naming task in order to further compare semantic relations. The graphs confirm that both groups of adults have similar number of labels and that Mandarin Chinese children have more specific labels than Brazilian Portuguese children. Moreover, results suggest that different languages require different strategies for intra-lexical development. The methodological implications for crosslinguistic studies of lexical bootstrapping are discussed.

1. Introduction Crosslinguistic studies can clarify language-universal and language-specific influences on language development. Those that focus on studies of early acquisition of the lexicon in the context of the Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis (LBH) are based mainly on diaries and parental reports (for instance see Dionne et al. 2003). The focus has been on vocabulary size and composition. In general, a strong correlation is found between lexical acquisition and grammatical development. These studies do not consider the conventional use of the lexicon. Rather, they focus mainly on vocabulary

74 Parente, Villavicencio, Siqueira, Chen and Tonietto size, and consider lexical semantic acquisition a homogeneous process, disregarding the complexity in acquiring lexical semantics. The conception of bootstrapping is that already available knowledge is used as a heuristics to learn something novel. Bootstrapping studies have focused on crossdomain bootstrapping effects, e.g. comparing lexical acquisition and other linguistics aspects, such as grammar and morphology. This paper addresses within-domain bootstrapping: Is the acquisition of lexical entries (labels) a predictor for their conventional use? Thus, this chapter discusses the Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis (LBH) focusing on two mechanisms of lexical-semantic acquisition: (i) identification and use of phonological strings (labels), and (ii) pragmatic development in learning the conventional meanings of verbs. In a crosslinguistic design, we verified the influence of the contrastive language structures and the intricacies between these two mechanisms when children develop strategies to manage the lexical semantic system of their language. As lexical acquisition requires different processes and steps (Golinkoff, Mervis, and Hirsh-Pasek 1994; Golinkoff et al. 1995), the issue is whether these steps happen independently or if there is homotypic continuity. This homotypic continuity, i.e., intra-lexical bootstrapping, postulates that a previously acquired lexical process will influence the acquisition of a subsequent process. Homotypic continuity has been found when comparing early lexical development with acquisition in later ages. Bates, Dale, and Thal (1995) propose homotypic continuity when they assert that the number of labels in young children can predict lexical acquisition in later ages. Crosslinguistic studies have been carried out to verify the universality of bootstrapping, using the number of words (labels) as a reference for lexical development as a whole. This is partially due to the fact that it is methodologically easy to count labels in parental reports or in oral recordings of child speech. Consequently, the number of labels becomes an index of lexical development. However, such studies do not take into account the fact that lexicalsemantic organization is different across languages, which may affect the relation between the number of words learnt by the child and his/her effective lexical development. It has recently been pointed out that the acquisition of verbal labels takes place much earlier and in a qualitatively diverse manner in children speaking certain languages, such as Korean and Chinese, when compared to English. Chinese and Korean children have a higher number of labels designating actions than English-speaking children (Gopnik, Choi, and Baumberger 1996).

The Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis and conventionality

75

If this higher number of labels effectively reflects lexical-semantic acquisition as a whole, we expect children speaking those languages to present an earlier lexical acquisition of verbs than children speaking IndoEuropean languages. Not only would Chinese children have a richer verb vocabulary, but they would also be able to use such labels in the appropriate situations, i.e. they would employ these labels in a conventional manner. An alternative view is based on the fact that the semantic complexity of words designating action used by children varies across languages, and therefore this complexity may not favour lexical-semantic acquisition. In this case, the conventional use of these word meanings by the children that use them may be independent from the number of labels acquired. This is the focus of the present study. Despite not being a longitudinal study, it proposes to analyze the acquisition of verbs by children from two cultures with different acquisition rates of verb labels, considering that the number of labels is related to semantic-pragmatic development. Before presenting the hypotheses, we discuss lexical acquisition and conventionality, the specificity of verbs in acquisition and the crosslinguistic studies that compare Chinese-Mandarin speaking children with children who speak Indo-European languages. 1.1. Lexical acquisition and conventionality This study is based on the idea that lexical-semantic acquisition involves several processes. Its development is interactive, but not necessarily homogenous. Golinkoff, Mervis, and Hirsh-Pasek (1994) attempt to compile and systematize the principles of lexical acquisition. These authors propose a lexical development structure on two levels. On the first level, the main process is label acquisition in designating objects. It is estimated that the first level is present around two years of age. On the second level, semantic categories are acquired according to the use and rules of a language. This level appears from the second half of the second year of age and allows the child to learn words rapidly and efficiently. During this period, the child concentrates on organizing the meanings of words. Following Golinkoff et al. (1994) one of the principles of the second level is the conventionality principle. It was earlier proposed by Clark (1988, 1997): for all meanings, there is a conventional form that speakers expect to be used in a linguistic community. Glock (2003) pointed out that

76 Parente, Villavicencio, Siqueira, Chen and Tonietto conventionality implies that language rules must be shared among speakers. Semantic or lexical conventions modulate the meaning of expressions. According to Golinkoff, Mervis, and Hirsh-Pasek (1994), the process of searching for conventionality motivates children to use adult forms, correcting super-extensions, neologisms, and idiosyncratic words. The model of different levels assumes that initial acquisition interferes with future steps. This means that a higher number of labels will favour complete semantic development. This has been confirmed in longitudinal studies within a single linguistic community, but not investigated in crosslinguistic studies comparing language acquisition in linguistic groups that present different label acquisition rates. Within this perspective, if speakers of a certain language acquire a greater number of labels (first level), this lexical increase provokes an improved use of words, and the categorical acquisition of conventionality takes place sooner (second level). 1.2. Specificity in lexical-semantic categorization One of the challenges for a child during acquisition is to understand the lexical-semantic organization of the language acquired. Referring to verb acquisition, Miller and Fellbaum (1991) suggest that verb lexical-semantics follows a three level organization, similar to the super-ordinate, basic and subordinate levels proposed by Rosch and Lloyd (1978) for noun taxonomy. Light verbs (e.g. do), acquired earlier, are located at the top level, generic verbs (e.g. cut) at the intermediate level (basic), and specific verbs (e.g. saw) at the bottom level. In this hierarchy, lower level action verbs may correspond to part of an event denoted by another action verb at a higher level (Jackendoff 1983). For instance, in the semantic decomposition of the verb run, the verb go represents part of the event; the decomposition of the verb saw (to cut with a saw) includes the verb divide as the result of the action. Verbs that contain other verbs/actions (e.g. saw) are more complex and more specific than those representing just one aspect of this event (e.g. divide). Based on this lexical-semantic organization, we expect more generic verbs to be “simpler” and acquired earlier, and the specific verbs “more complex”, to be acquired later by children. This is the opinion of Duvignau and Gaume (2004) when they propose that there is a dynamic process during early development of the verb lexicon, beginning with the use of generic verbs and then moving towards the use of specific verbs to express actions.

The Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis and conventionality

77

Moreover, lexical acquisition requires not only linguistic and cognitive resources, but also social knowledge. Bruner (1983) and Tomasello (2003) show that, aside from memorizing new labels, young children need to figure out the object to which adults normally refer with these labels. Their main task is to use the words in adequate situations as determined by their linguistic community. When learning the conventional usage of words, children adopt several strategies that are manifested on the linguistic surface by their semantic approximations. In short, after a label acquisition step, lexical development goes through a period of learning word categories and conventional use according to the rules of its linguistic community. During this last stage, the specificity principle seems to follow lexical development. The question here is whether these same lexical-semantic development principles can be applied to different linguistic cultures. 1.3. Crosslinguistic studies comparing the acquisition of verb labels by Chinese Mandarin-speaking children with children speaking IndoEuropean languages Crosslinguistic studies on lexical acquisition have previously focused on the noun-bias hypotheses proposed by Gentner (1978, 1981, 1982). Examining the corpora of different languages, Gentner observes that in the acquisition of first words, i.e. between one and two years of age, children produce more nouns than verbs. This hypothesis has been confirmed for Italian, a Romance language like Portuguese (Caselli et al. 1995). These authors interpret these data as the result of concreteness. Nouns, in this sense, are much more concrete than verbs; the latter denote relational meanings, and thus are semantically more difficult to acquire. Recently, crosslinguistic studies on the acquisition of first words have shown that Chinese Mandarin-speaking and Korean-speaking children produce more verbs than English-speaking children. Tardif (1996, 2006), Tardif, Gelman and Xu (1999), Tardif, Schatz, and Naigles (1997) and Gopnik, Choi, and Baumberger (1996) find that input should have some influence, since East Asian language-speaking mothers use more verbs than Englishspeaking mothers. The circumstances surrounding the observation can also lead to crosscultural differences. Verbs are more evident in story-telling situations, but in check lists (used for mothers to identify which words their children have said) and in playing situations, no differences are found in the number of verbs produced by either group of children.

78 Parente, Villavicencio, Siqueira, Chen and Tonietto Gopnik, Choi, and Baumberger (1996) describe several linguistic structures that should favour verb acquisition. They are: (1) frequent one-verb structures; (2) subject deletion; and (3) different verb endings to distinguish semantic features. These linguistic features are proposed for the comparison between East Asian languages, such as Korean and Chinese, and English. The differences between Chinese and Portuguese are not based on sentence level, but on their morphological structure, as follows: 1. One-verb sentences do not differ in Chinese and Portuguese languages.

One-verb sentences are frequent in both languages, but in Mandarin, due to the absence of inflection, the context clarifies the subject, whereas in Portuguese, verb inflection always indicates the subject, as well as the tense and mood. For instance, in Mandarin, the one-verb sentences
% zou3 ‘go’ and  lai2 ‘come’ are acceptable. In Portuguese, one-verb sentences are also acceptable, but verb inflection clarifies the subject and the tense of the action, as in vamos ‘let’s go’, ‘we+present+go’ and venha ‘come’, ‘you+present+come’. 2. Subject deletion also appears in both languages. This deletion is acceptable and occurs frequently in Chinese, in expressions such as ? qu4 (go) na3 er(where) ‘Where (shall we) go?’ The subject can also be deleted in Portuguese, but it is clearly marked by verbal inflection, as in onde vamos?, where ‘us+present+go’. 3. Finally, verb endings with semantic meanings, that is, rich word composition denoting semantic content in Mandarin is not present in Portuguese verbs. For example, in Mandarin there are verbs like: (1) da3 ‘hit’;
 da3(hit) kai1(open) ‘open’;  da3(hit) bao4(to explose) ‘explode’;  da3(hit) po4(break) ‘break’; and (2)
 nong4 ‘do’;  nong4 huai4 (bad, expoiled)‘break’;  nong4 hao3(good) ‘fix’;  nong4 kai1(open) ‘open’. As we can see in the last four examples, the meaning is the result of the original meaning of the two syllables together. But there are numerous exceptions. For instance, in the case of the verb da3(hit) kai1(open) ‘open’ the first syllable denotes a manner, and the second, the action ‘open’, but this word can be used for opening without hitting. More striking is the case of the verb qi2 (to ride) che1 (vehicle), used only for riding a bicycle and the verb  kai1(to operate, to start) che1 (vehicle) used only for riding in a car, but both compositions do not help the listener to know if the word refers to a bicycle or a car. It should be noted that in Mandarin, the semantic/syntactic features are not marked on the verbs. Context and word order are very important for under-

The Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis and conventionality

79

standing the grammatical class of words. On the other hand, Portuguese, like other Romance languages such as French, Spanish and Italian, has a rich and complex inflectional system with verb endings that mark the subject, tense and mood, as in the following examples: amo ‘I love’ ‘I+ present’; amarei ‘I will love’, ‘I+future’; amavas ‘you loved’, ‘you+simple past’. In a different approach, Ma et al. (2006) provide a semantic explanation linked to cognitive processing: the high “imaginability” of Chinese verbs makes them easier to learn, since they refer to very concrete actions or events. For instance, ! bei1 ‘carry on the back’,  bao4 ‘carry with arms’, duan1 ‘carry with two hands’ (Ma et al. 2006). In Mandarin, several verbs have clear constraints regarding aspect, such as  bao1 ‘peel something with two hands’,
 xiao1 ‘peel something with knife’, 
qie1 ‘cut downward’,  ge1 ‘cut sideward’. In those cases, Portuguese uses one word, without aspectual specification (descascar ‘to peel’, cortar ‘to cut’). Even if it is sometimes possible to specify aspect in Portuguese verbs (for instance, martelar ‘to hammer’ or ‘to cut with hammer’), this is not frequent. As Ma et al. (2006) point out, differences in the early acquisition of verb labels should occur in crosslinguistic studies that compare child acquisition of English and Chinese because verbs frequently used by English children are more abstract when compared to those used by Chinese children. This chapter describes two crosslinguistic studies on verb acquisition: (a) one, with an experimental design, compares the number of labels Chinese-Mandarin (CM) children and Brazilian-Portuguese (BP) children acquire and their conventionality and specificity; and (b) the second study, with an exploratory design, compares the verbal-lexical organization of the same children through computer modelling and graphs to detect possible differences or similarities in the semantic organization of the verbal vocabulary of CM- and BP-speaking children. 2.

First study: Chinese and Portuguese children’s performance on number of labels, conventional use and specificity of verbs in a naming task

2.1. Hypotheses Despite the verb advantage shown in the first moments of language acquisition in several works (Tardif 1996; Tardif, Gelman, and Xu 1999; Ma et al. 2006), what this means for verb naming in a later period of language development is not well established yet. Based on the cross-linguistic differences

80 Parente, Villavicencio, Siqueira, Chen and Tonietto found in an earlier cross-linguistic comparison between Chinese and Brazilian children, we formulate the following questions and hypotheses: 1. Does the verb advantage in verb acquisition found in the early language

development of Chinese children when compared to Brazilian children persist in later periods? Our hypothesis is that the advantage found in the earlier acquisition period remains when children are 3 to 4-yearsold. 2. Do 3 to 4-year-old Chinese children use a higher number of specific verbs than Brazilian Portuguese children, as found by Ma et al. (2006) in younger children? We expect that Chinese-speaking children will present a bias towards specific verbs, whereas Brazilian-Portuguese speaking children will have a bias towards generic verbs. 3. Will Chinese-speaking children also present a higher degree of conventional use of verbs to denote actions? Due to the need to learn more specific meanings for each verb, the acquisition of conventional meaning by Chinese-speaking children is more laborious. Thus, we hypothesize that, despite knowing a higher number of labels, there are no differences as to their conventional use when compared to Brazilian-Portuguese speaking children. In order to test label number and label conventional use, we have developed a naming action task presented in short films, which are adequate stimuli to elicit verbs as utterances. In addition to comparing Chinese and Brazilian children, we used two groups of adults as controls for the visual stimuli task. If the stimuli and the procedure are equivalent in the two languages, there should be no differences in number, conventional use, or specificity among adults. 2.2.

Method

2.2.1. Participants Seventy-nine children (39 Chinese-speaking and 40 Portuguese-speaking) and 73 adults (33 Chinese-speaking and 40 Portuguese-speaking) participated in the experiment. After the initial data analyses, one Chinese boy was excluded because his specificity criteria score was more than two points lower than the average for his group. The final sample consisted of four groups of Mandarin- and Portuguese-speaking children and adults. Children were divided into two groups as follows: (1) 38 monolingual Chinese-

The Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis and conventionality

81

speaking children (18 girls and 20 boys), between 37 and 49 months of age (A=43.24; SD=3.37), from a kindergarten affiliated to Peking University; (2) 40 monolingual Portuguese-speaking children (22 girls and 18 boys) from four kindergartens located in the city of Canoas, in the metropolitan area of Porto Alegre, Brazil, with the same age range and similar age average (A=41.88; SD=3.00). Inclusion in the study depended on parent and teacher reports of normal nonverbal cognitive abilities and age-adequate, receptive, and expressive language skills. Participants had normal or corrected hearing and visual acuity. All children of the Chinese and Portuguese groups were monolinguals. Their parents spoke only Mandarin or Brazilian Portuguese at home, and in kindergarten these were the languages spoken by the teachers. In both countries, children’s families belonged to the middle-class social-economic stratum. The adults’ ages in both groups ranged between 19 and 24 years of age. Adults included (1) 33 college students from Peking University (A=21.15; SD=1.82), and (2) 40 college students from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – UFRGS – and Centro Universitário La Salle – Unilasalle – Brazil (A=21.53; SD=1.97). Regarding gender distribution, there were 16 female and 17 male Chinese adults, and 18 female and 22 male Brazilian adults. 2.2.2. Procedures and Materials All parents allowed their children to participate in this study, and research ethics requirements of each country were met. We presented to each participant 17 videos in which a young woman walks towards a table where several objects are displayed. She picks one of them and performs a specific action. The videos were presented in Windows Media Player format in a randomized order (Duvignau and Gaume 2004b). The length of each film varied from 42 seconds to 1 minute and 13 seconds. The 17 actions which compose each video integrate the destruction pole, one of the semantic poles identified in the study of Gaume, Duvignau, Gasquet and Gineste (2002). Each subject saw the films alone with the examiner in a quiet room. The child was asked to name the action in each video after the action was performed (“
&”; “O que a mulher fez?”; “What did the woman do?”). In both settings, the experimenter was a native speaker and took part in the children’s routines prior to the application of the instrument in order to make them feel more accustomed to the testing situation. Although the task was relatively simple even for the younger children, if the

82 Parente, Villavicencio, Siqueira, Chen and Tonietto child did not answer on the first request, the experimenter tried to motivate her, asking again for an answer. For this study, we focused on the answers in which verbs were related to the action depicted in the films. We did not analyze the lack of answers and non-relevant answers. Non-relevant answers include: meta-linguistic expressions, nouns (for instance, objects and the character depicted in the films) and verbs not related to the action depicted in the film, i.e. answers considered completely inappropriate (e.g., “eating” the orange). A mean of 0.62 (SD=1.33) of the CM-speaking children responses and a mean of 1.25 (SD=1.35) of the BP-speaking children responses were disregarded. The answers were classified according to (1) the number of different labels (2) conventionality (conventional vs. approximate), and (3) specificity (specific vs. generic). 2.2.3. The number of different labels in terms of verb types The number of different verb labels produced by each participant in the whole experiment (17 videos) was calculated; therefore, the maximal score of each participant was 17. If a participant used the same label in two or more different films, those same responses were counted as a single label, and hence, the score was lower than 17. 2.2.4. Criteria for the classification of conventionality Conventional verb: a verb that speakers are expected to use relative to the action depicted in the film, according to Clark (1988). For instance: [serrar and cortar] (to saw and cut) were conventional answers in the film where the woman saws a piece of wood; as well as [] (to peel the orange), in the film in which the woman peels an orange with her hands. For this experiment, the conventionality judgement of each verb was made by two expert independent judges in each language. The Kappa test showed an agreement rate of .74 for Chinese verbs and .82 for Portuguese verbs. The final score was obtained by judge agreement, and, in borderline cases, other judges were asked to rate the answers. Non-conventional verb or approximate verb: a verb related to the action depicted in the film from a semantic point of view, but not necessarily conventionally established for that action from a pragmatic point of view. For instance: [quebrar] (to break) for the action of exploding a balloon; [ '#] (to saw parsley) for the action of chopping parsley with a knife.

The Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis and conventionality

83

2.2.5. Criteria for the classification of specificity Specific verb: a verb with a restricted meaning, used in a specific semantic domain. For instance: [] [rasgar o jornal] (to tear a newspaper); [" ] [descascar a cenoura] (to peel a carrot with a peeler). Generic verb: a verb with a broad meaning, used in several semantic domains. For instance, to hit ([bater] in Portuguese and [] in Chinese) could be used in several films, such as [] [bater um balão] (to hit the balloon), [$] [bater num tomate] (to hit the tomato), [] [bater no copo] (to hit the glass). For specificity criteria, Kappa agreement rates were .76 for Chinese verbs and .85 for Portuguese verbs. 2.3. Results The mean and standard deviation of total answers, the number of verb labels, and conventional and specific verbs are shown in Table 1. Data were submitted to a 2 x 2 ANOVA, with language (Chinese vs. Brazilian Portuguese) and age (children vs. adults) as main factors. Measured parameters were total answers, number of labels, conventionality and specificity. A Pearson correlation test analysed the relation between the number of labels, and conventional and specific verbs in each group of children. A linear regression analysis was used to verify if the number of labels predicts conventionality and specificity in children’s answers. Results are presented in the same order as the questions of this study presented above. Table 1. Total of answers, number of different verb labels, conventional and specific verbs produced in the naming task by Chinese and Brazilian children and adults.


Total of answers


Number of Conventional verbs
Specific verbs
different verb labels
Mean SD

Country

Mean SD

Children

China

15.85 1.53 9.21

1.59 12.33 2.43 75.53 11.77 2.83 70.21

Mean SD

Brazil

15.38 2.03 7.30

1.29 12.10 2.64 78.44 6.18

Adults

China

17.00 0.00 12.33 1.16 15.67 1.28 91.44 15.82 1.04 85.20

Brazil

16.93 0.27 12.70 1.64 16.05 0.85 96.28 10.93 1.68 65.32

* mean percentage in relation to valid responses

%*

Mean SD

%*

2.24 38.95

84 Parente, Villavicencio, Siqueira, Chen and Tonietto 2.3.1. Were there cross-linguistic and developmental differences in the naming task? Number of valid answers and different labels: A valid answers analysis shows a significant effect of age (F(1.148)=40.33; p