Accelerated learning without semantic similarity: Indirect objects

Anat Ninio

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

The hypothesis was tested that transfer and facilitation of learning in early syntactic development does not rely on semantic analogy among the items. The study focused on the verb-indirect object (VI) construction. Longitudinal naturalistic speech corpora of 14 Hebrew-speaking children (1;04-2;08) were analyzed, 9 females and 5 males, White and predominantly middle class. There was facilitation of learning among the first 10 verbs in the VI pattern, as evidenced by the accelerating growth curves. However, there was much semantic variability among the 10 indirect objects, and most had no semantically similar antecedents in the same construction. The results indicate that facilitation of learning of early syntax is most probably not mediated by semantic similarity.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)531-556
Number of pages26
JournalCognitive Linguistics
Volume16
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 2005

Keywords

  • Analogy
  • Constructions
  • Semantics
  • Syntactic development
  • Transfer of learning

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