THE USE OF SENTENCE STRUCTURE AND PRAGMATIC CUES IN NOVEL VERB LEARNING: A CROSS-LINGUISTIC STUDY OF MANDARIN CHINESE AND ENGLISH By

As children hear a novel verb in a NOUN-VERB-NOUN (i.e., NVN) structure, they generally infer that the verb is transitive, like the verb “hit” (Naigles, 1990; Yuan, Fisher, & Snedeker, 2012). However, the relationship between sentence structure and a verb’s transitivity status is not straightforward. Particularly, in typologically pro-drop languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, the object in a sentence is often dropped, so that transitive verbs commonly appear in the NOUN-VERB (i.e., NV) structure. Transitive verbs thus appear in variable sentence structures in Mandarin. On the other hand, though English also allows object dropping, object dropping does not occur as frequently and freely as in Mandarin. Discourse studies show that speakers’ uses of object-dropping are closely related to the discourse-pragmatic principle of NEWNESS/OLDNESS, which is linguistically universal. Therefore, this study compared Mandarin-speaking and English-speaking children’s interpretation of a novel verb in an object-dropping context, specifically testing whether children in both language groups could utilize the NEWNESS/OLDNESS cue in the context of object omission, then interpret a verb as still being transitive in the NV structure. Children from both language groups participated in a verb-learning experiment, in which novel verbs were presented in the object-dropping context, an NV-only, and an NVN-only context. After learning the novel verbs, children decided whether the novel verbs were transitive or intransitive. Results suggest that for both language groups, when novel verbs were presented in the object-dropping context (i.e., NVN sentence followed by a NV sentence), children gave more transitive/causative interpretations than when these verbs were presented in the NV-only context. This suggests that children from both language groups used the pragmatic cue of NEWNESS/OLDNESS in the object-omission context. The results also show that across