Syntax and semantics in the acquisition of locative verbs

Syntax and semantics in the verbs* acquisition of locative JESS GROPEN Stanford University STEVEN PINKER, MICHELLE HOLLANDER Massachusetts Institute of Technology RICHARD GOLDBERG University of Maryland (Received August I989 Revised 19 February I990 ABSTRACT Children between the ages of three and locative verbs like pour and fill, such as seven occasionally make e•'rors with filled water into the glass and * I poured the glass with water (Bowerman, I982 ) To account for this pattern of errors, and for how they are eventually unlearned, we propose that children use a universal linking rule called OBJECT Ai•FECTEDNESS: the direct object corresponds to the argument that is specified as 'affected' in some particular * I way in the semantic representation of a verb However, children must learn which verbs specify which of their arguments specifically, as being affected whether it is the argument whose referent is undergoing change of location, a such as the content argumen t of pour, the argument whose referent is undergoing a change of state, such as theor container argument of fill This predicts that syntactic errors should be associated with specific kinds of misinterpretations of verb meaning Two experiments were performed on the ability of children and adults to understand and produce locative verbs The results confirm that children tend to make syntactic with errors sentences containing fill and empty, encoding the content argument as direct [*] We thank Kay Bock, Carey, Eve Clark, Ken Wexler and Carol Tenny for their grateful to the directors, parents arid especially children of the following After School Care Program, Inc., Cambridge Nursery School, Central School, Children's Village, Inc., Creative Development Center, KLH helpful Susan comments We are also centres: Bowen Center, Needham Children's Community Center, Newton Community Service Center, Plowshares Child Care Program, Recreation Place, Rosary Academy Learning Center, Temple Beth Shalom, and the Zervas Program The research reported here is part of the first author's doctoral dissertation Experiment was presented at the Twelfth Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development This research was supported by NIH grant HD I838I to the second author, and by a grant from the Alfred P Sloan Foundation to the MIT Center for Cognitive Science Address for correspondence: Jess Gropen, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 943o5, USA II CHILD object (e.g fill meanings of fill water) LANGUAGE LOCATIVE predicted, children requiring not only that also misinterpreted the and empty as the container be brought into a full or empty state, but also that the content move in some specific (by pouring, or by dumping) Furthermore, children who mismanner interpreted the verbs' meanings were more likely to make syntactic errors with them These findings support the hypothesis that verb meaning and syntax are linked in precise ways in the lexicons of language learners the As INTRODUCTION Although syntax and semantics interact in the generation of errors and the recovery from them in language development, there have been few concrete demonstrations of how this works in detail The purpose of tfiis work is to understand this interaction in children's acquisition of locative verbs verbs such as pour, fill, empty and load Locative verbs express an event involving the transfer of CONTENT to (I) or from (2) a CONTAINER They are further subdivided as to whether the content argument (i a, 2a) or the container argument (i b, 2b) is encoded as the syntactic direct object We shall refer to these syntactic forms as CONTENT-OBJECT SENTENCES and CONTAINER-OBJECT SENTENCES, respectively, and to the verbs appearing in them as CONTENTOBJECT VERBS and CONTAINER-OBJECT VERBS (see Schwartz-Norman, I976) Some locative verbs (i c, 2c), which we shall call ALTERNATORS, may accept either the content or container argument as direct object (We are only concerned with readings of these sentences in which both postverbal phrases are arguments of the verb, and not in cases where the PP is taken to be an embedded modifier of the direct object, e.g Gus dumped the can of garbage, but not the can of compost.) Betty poured water into the cup/*poured' the cup with water Tom dripped paint onto the floor/*dripped the floor with paint b Mike filled the cup with water/*filled water into the cup Lloyd covered the bed with a sheet/*covered a sheet onto the bed c George loaded the gun with ammo/loaded ammo into the gun Dan stuffed the hamper with laundry/stuffed laundry into the a hamper 2a Gus dumped garbage from the can/*dumped the ,can of garbage Tom wiped paint from the brush/*wiped the brush of paint b Bob ridded the room of bugs/*ridded bugs from the room The crops depleted the soil of nutrients/*depleted nutrients from the soil ice cream from the c Sally emptied the carton of ice cream/emptied carton Bob drained the sink of water/drained ii6 water from the sink Bowerman ACQUISITION (i 982) has documented an interesting 13-shaped developmental production of locative sentences by her two children although Eva initially used these verbs correctly, errors emerge within the pattern in the Christy and range of three to years of age, after which the errors decline Bowerman involved children overextending the content-object form to verbs that ordinarily encode only the container argument as direct object, as in I didn't fill water up to drink it (Eva, I) According to Bowerman, errors of the converse type-involving use of incorrect verbs in the container-object construction-are less frequent Examples of both kinds of errors appear in Table i Pinker (i 989) also found seven errors involving locative verbs in three different four-year-old children, such as I filled the grain up and And fill the little sugars up in the bowl found that the TABLE seven most I frequent errors Examples of overgeneralization (Bowerman, I982) argument as direct object I'm going to touch it on your pants didn't fill water up to drink it; filled it up for the flowers to drink it M Simon says, Touch your toes' C: To what (interprets toes as content, is now looking for container) [note that this is a comprehension error] E (4; 5) I'm going to cover screen over me C (4;9) She's gonna pinch it on my foot E (4; xI) And I'll give you these eggs you can fill up (giving M beads to put into cloth chicken-shaped container) E (5;o) Can fill some salt into the bear bear-shaped salt shaker] E (5 3) Terri said if this rhinestone on a shirt] were diamond then people would be trying to rob the shirt C (6; xo) Feel your hand to that Errors with the container argument as direct object E (2; 1) Mommy, poured you [M: You poured me ?] Yeah, with water E (•4; i) don't want it [= toast] because spilled it of orange juice Errors with the E (3;0) E (4; I) C (4; 3) content Bowerman notes that this pattern of development suggests a process of reorganization, driven by the child's discovery that a set of verbs, acquired independently, have a common kind of mapping of semantic arguments onto syntactic roles This process, she points out, is similar to what applies in the familiar example from inflectional morphology In the case of locative verbs, children first use individual verb-specific forms such as fill the glass (cf the morphologically-irregular broke, first learned by rote) Then, they abstract the pattern whereby verbs like load that take the content-object sentence can also take the container-object sentence This allows them to overgeneralize the content-object form to container-object verbs, such as infill the water (cf breaked) Bowerman suggests (following Talmy, I972) that the contentobject form is overgeneralized more than the container-object form because it is the dominant pattern in English for expressing locative events Ac- CHILD LANGUAGE LOCATIVE cordingly, the overregularization of the form is less common (e.g 1spilled it of orange juice) for the container-object same reason that the overregularization of irregular past tense inflections is rare (e.g brang on the pattern of sang) Although there are similarities between late errors with irregular inflection and locative forms, there are also some dissimilarities that merit further examination First, whereas irregular morphological forms generally constitute a minority of the lexicon, and are by definition idiosyncratic, neither is true of the locative verbs that overgeneralized According to Rappaport & Levin's (1985) near-exhaustivearelist of locative verbs involving addition of content to a container (not counting 125 two verbs from the list which placed into more than one syntactic subcategory), were the non-alternators are in the majority (9z), not the minority Second, among the non-alternators there are almost four times as many container-object verbs (73) as content-object verbs (19), exactly the opposite that required to explain the greater verbs Furthermore, the rankings are same we consider token frequencies: according to the frequency analysis performed by Francis & Kucera (1982) on the basis of million-word corpus, the sum of text-frequencies a is greater for the nonalternators (1295) than for the alternators (658), and greater for the containerobject verbs (944) than for the content-object verbs frequency analysis fails to distinguish between different(351) (Of course, their argument structures that a verb may take, and it bears only an indirect relationship to adult-tochild speech.) More interestingly, neither of the non-alternating locative forms consists of idiosyncratic exceptions The principal difference betwe'en the contentobject and container-object forms is which gets mapped onto the role of direct object It can be shown that in argument broad outline, all locative verbs conform to a single principle governing the linking of semantic arguments to grammatical functions, which call the frequency of pattern with obtained if errors we RULE to container-object OBJECT AFFECTEDNESS LINKING An argument is encodable as the direct object Of a verb if its i-e•re•t ••pe•ifie-d being affected in a specific way in the semantic representation of the verb According to this rule, the choice of direct object is governed by whether the content or the container must undergo a specified change in order for the verb"to apply The change, however, can be a change either of physical position or a change of state (which may itself be mentally represented as change of position in an abstract 'state space': see Jackendoff, 1983) Fora example, the meaning of pour specifies the particular way in which the content is affected: a substance move in a cohesive stream, in contrast with, say, dripping or showering must But pour does not specify the change of state of any container or surface to which the substance moves one can pour water into a glass, beside a glass, onto the ground, and so on The linking rule thus 118 as ACQUISITION is that the content argument, but not the container argument, specified with verbs manner Other of a pour encodable as the direct object of a container are of motion of a content without a specified change of state and shake drip spill, such form, content-object the as also restricted to which the In contrast, the meaning of fill specifies the particular way in being not full to is affected- it undergoes a change of state from the which content being full but it does not specify the particular manner in dripping by water into is affected one can fill a glass by pouring water into it, that specifies thus rule linking it, or by dipping a glass into a bathtub The encodable is as the the container argument, but not the content argument, specify and up stop like cover, saturate direct object of fill Similarly, verbs only change of state of a container, and can only encode the container argument as direct object Finally, the meaning of the verb stuff jointly constrains the particularof change of location that the content undergoes and the particular change for In stuffing clothes into a hamper, state that the container undergoes the hamper (perhaps compressing into forced be clothing must instance, the remaining the clothing) BECAUSE the hamper is being filled.to a point where its the relative amount of to capacity is too small,, or just barely big enough, the direct then, rule, linking clothing that is being forced in According to the the either content or container object of stuff should be able to encode Other alternators alternator is argument, and this is what we find: stuff an simultaneously changes of in defined terms also specify actions that are where force dab, brush such container, and or as specified in terms of content of where load container, the a kind against or is applied pushing the content the in container act the enables to or move container the dictated by specifies •container a content designed way (e.g, a camera, or a gun) The fact that the direct object always corresponds to the affected entity in locative verbs manifests itself as a subtle semantic difference between the versions For example, John loaded the cart with apples implies that the cart does is completely filled with apples, but John loaded the apples into the cart 197'1) be (Anderson, seen as a can not This HOLISTIC INTERPRETATION of a change specifying state a consequence of the container-object form natural the most of change content; a container rather than a location interpretation of a state change is that it is the entire object that undergoes the change (see Rappaport & Levin, 1985; Pinker, 1989) the The object affectedness rule may be quite general, applying not only to languages other in its but counterparts English in alternation to holistic Both the same kinds of verbs that alternate in English, and the found in the interpretation accompanying the container-object form, can be that are locative alternations of a variety of languages, including many genetically and areally distinct from English (Moravcsik, 1978; Foley & Van Valin, 1985; Rappaport & Levin, 1986; Gropen, 1989; Pinker, 1989) iocative 119 CHILD Furthermore, the principle be LANGUAGE apply constructions other than across Verbs which an animate entity (an AGENT) brings about a direct effect on another in entity (a PATIENT), such as verbs of causation of change of position (e.g causative slide) or state (e.g causative melt), or verbs of ingestion (e.g eat), are almost invariably transitive languages, with patients as direct objects In across contrast, verbs that fall outside this broad semantic class show variation within and across languages, with either argument appearing moredirect object, such as in verbs of emotion as (fear vs frighten), or with prepositional objects expressing the non-agentive argument, such as in verbs of perception (see vs physical contact without a change in the contacted look at) and in verbs of surface (hit hit at); locative forms Hopper the can languages seen to Thompson, •98o; Levin, i985; holism & vs Talmy, •985 Furthermore,see interpretation of direct objects quite and effect accompanies the semantic shifts can be seen in the difference between Kurt climbed the mountain and Kurt climbed the mountain, only the first implying that the entire mountain has been up scaled, and in a variety of other constructions discussed in Green, Moravcsik, generally: similar •974; •978; Hopper &] Thompson, 980; Levin, i985 and Pinker, •989 The fact that non-alternating verbs conform to a crosslinguistically widespread linking pattern, rather than being a list of idiosyncrasies, suggests that children may actually use the linking rule in acquiring the locative alternation,j and that it may play a role both in the genesis of their errors and in their recovery from them Though the linking rule appears to be nearuniversal, the meanings of individual verbs clearly are not Therefore it is possible that,mistakes in verb meaning, such entity is affected, might be the source of the as the specification Of which syntactic errors reported by Bowerman (i982)" Specifically, if a child erroneously thought that a converb such asfill specified some specific manner of motion of the content-pouring, for example- he or she could derive a content-object form from it using the linking rule, and would produce errors like fill the water tainer-object Previous research suggests that children indeed slow in fixing the meanings of verbs compared arewith the meanings of nouns (Gentner, standard adult •975; •982) In particular, they have more difficulty acquiring meaning components relevant to changes of state than components relevant to changes of location (Gentner that this may be part of larger suggests a aattern whe"reby functional components of word meaning difficult are more :han perceptual/actional components.) For example, Gentner contrasted the zerb mix, which she suggests specifies a particular change of state ('an ncrease in homogeneity') but is noncommittal about the kind of action that ;ffects it, with stir, beat and shake, which about the esulting state, but which require particular are noncommittal of motion man•ers Children ,ged five to nine and adults were asked to describe six kinds of I20 LOCATIVE to events and to ACQUISITION verify whether each of the four verbs to them: a stirring, shaking motion performed onwassaltappropriate and water (which could 'mix ') cream (which, already being a homogeneous substance, could not) encoding manners of motion posed no problem for the children beating, or on Verbs or 97 % 7-year-olds and 93 % of the 7- to 9-year-olds paired the correct manner-of-motion verb with the appropriate manner of motion However, the end-state requirement of mix was poorly grasped: the 5- to 7-year-olds used mix on 48 % of the trials where the substance was mixable and 46 % of the 5- to of the trials where it was on not Note that this asymmetry in the acquisition together with the object affectedness rule, of verb meaning components, offers us an independently motivated explanation for why the content-object sentence is produced and overapplied more frequently than the container-object sentence, and, unlike the analogy with overregularization of irregular morphology, it does depend on questionable assumptions about not locative forms in the input Another advantage the frequencies of different the linking theory over the overregularization theory is that it provides to hypothesis about how the a errors are eventually unlearned This is a general problem in language acquisition, since children are not corrected reliably misor even comprehended when they make grammatical errors (Brown & Hanlon 97o), so overgeneral rules are always logically compatible with the child's linguistic experience (Braine, i97i Baker, •979; Pinker, •984; •989) Though it has been suggested that subtle statistical in patterns parental reactions might differentiate ungrammatical from grammatical it seems highly sentences, unlikely that such feedback could be of much use in unlearning locative errors, since they are too infrequent allow to aggregation of significant differences in parental feedback types (e.g out of a database of 22,303 utterances in the Brown corpus for Adam Snow, •985) Pinker (•989) found only three onclearCHILDES (MacWhinney & syntactic errors (o'ooo• %) with locative verbs) Furthermore, the errors occur far later than the which such feedback might ages at occur (see Bowerman, I987; Pinker' •989) The standard solution to the no-negative-evidence problem in the of morphology is that irregular forms block the application Of the regularcaserule, when the child hears broke so and realizes that it is nothing more than the break, he or she will avoid saying breaked (see Pinker, x984; Pinkerpast& Prince, 988) But no such blocking relation exists in the of case of the locative that the reliably indicating that fill the water is ungrammatical child could take as The non-occurrence of such forms in parental speech cannot impel the child to reject them, because the child be of extending the alternation to true alternating verbs thatmusthappen capable not to have been used in both forms in the input, such as, say, daub or spatter In contrast, the account based on the object linking rule does suggest an account of how the alternation: there is no kind of parental sentence syntactic I2I errors are CHILD LANGUAGE unlearned Children can learn that a verb likefill does not require a particular of motion of the content as soon as they hear the verb used in a clear context in which no such motion takes place: for example, when a glass is filled by means of bailing or dripping When the child processes such inputs that falsify the erroneous manner component and he or she expunges that component from the verb's semantic representation, the linking rule will no longer map the content argument onto the direct object function, and the 1989; Pinker, 1989) errors will cease (see Gropen, In two experiments, we tested the hypothesis that children use the object affectedness linking rule to predict the syntactic privileges of verbs, but that they must learn what is and is not specified as affected in the semantic representations of individual verbs First, using a task where children describe pictures, we tried to confirm that children overgenerate locative forms in sentences like The man is filling the water and The man is pouring the glass with water, and to see whether we replicated the asymmetry in favour of the former type of error, involving container-object verbs in contentobject constructions Second, using a two-alternative forced-choice task in which children select pictures corresponding to locative verbs, we attempted to determine whether children misinterpret the meanings of locative verbs, perhaps thinking that (e.g,)fill specifies the particular manner in which a substance changes location instead of the particular change of state that a container undergoes Third, we tested whether syntactic and semantic errors individual children- for example, whether children across are associated who misinterpret the meaning of fill to specify the manner in which a substance moves will be more inclined to express the content argument as the direct object manner LOCATIVE ACQUISITION children were drawn from middle-class day-care and after-school programs Eight children were replaced in the design because of their unwillingness or inability to perform the syntactic task Materials Twenty-five line drawings were created, each composed of two panels, like first panel depicted the manner in which a substance a comic strip The changed location during the course of an action; the second depicted the endstate of a container as a result of the action One example is reproduced in Fig I, where the first panel depicts a woman pouring water from a pitcher i-nto a glass and the second panel depicts an empty glass next to a puddle of water, showing that the woman had spilled the water Fig displays another example: the first panel shows a woman turning on a tap, allowing water to drip from the spigot into a glass; the second panel shows a glass full of water A subject who knows that the meaning of pour specifies the manner in which location should choose Fig over Fig as the better a substance changes EXPERIMENT experiment we tested children's and adults' syntactic and semantic knowledge of six common locative verbs: pour, fill, dump, empty, stuff and splash The parts of the experiment dealing with the verbs stuff and splash are not discussed here, because they are alternating verbs (so syntactic errors, strictly speaking, are impossible) and because children and adults performed similarly on them They are discussed in detail in Gropen (1989) In this Fig x A picture of 'pouring-spilling' in Experiment Fig z A picture of 'dripping-filling' in Experiment METHOD Subjects Sixty-four native speakers of English living in the Boston area participated: 16 children (1 • boys, girls) aged 2; to 3;5 (mean 3;1);16 (7 boys, girls) aged 3;6 to 4;5 (mean 3;11); i6 (8 boys, girls) aged 4;6 to 5;•1 (mean 5;o); and 16 paid undergraduate and graduate students at MIT The I22 123 CHILD LANGUAGE LOCATIVE example of 'pouring' Similarly, a subject who knows that the meaning offill specifies the resulting endstate of the container should choose Fig z over Fig as the better example of 'filling' Of the z5 pictures, one depicted a boy hitting a ball with a bat in the first panel, with the ball breaking a window in the second panel It was used to ensure that the subjects understood that the drawings depicted two events or states that were causally related The remaining z4 drawings were used to test the subjects' semantic and syntactic knowledge of pour, fill, dump and empty The semantic test was designed to assess what we shall call a BIAS in the interpretation of a verb's meaning; subjects were forced to choose which of two pictures, differing in manner and endstate, best represented the meaning of the verb (e.g whether fill means pouring or fill means filling) Verbs and drawings were chosen in pairs so that we could test what we thought would be the most likely misinterpretations of the verbs Specifically, we thought that a child might interpret fill to specify a pouring manner, pour to specify a full endstate, empty to specify a dumping manner, and dump to specify an empty endstate This also provides a built-in control: because the verbs in these pairs are closely related in meaning, we were able to test subjects' interpretation of both verbs of a pair using the same sets of pictures (across subjects), ensuring that subjects' responses were not due to the salience of the pictures themselves Twelve pictures were shared for trials with the x•erbs pour andfill Of these Z, subsets of three pictures depicted the same scenario- that is, the same agent, container and content- with one picture ambiguous between pouring and filling (e.g Fig 3), one depicting pouring but not filling (Fig i), and one depictingfilling but not pouring (Fig z) Similarly, a set of iz pictures was shared for the verbs dump and empty We used four different picture sets in testing the meaning of each verb so that the idiosyncrasies of any one scenario could not explain the results Table • lists descriptions of the pictures used in the testing of pour/fill and dump/empty, organized by scenario Within TABLE man used in the testing of 'pour'/'fill' 'dump '/' empty' PANEL from tap into sink water (Pour/Fill) Scenario Az girl pours honey girl drips honey girl pours honey bowl filled with honey bowl filled with honey empty bowl/spilled honey from bottle into bowl from fork into bowl from bottle into bowl (Pour/Fill) Scenario BI bucket filled with paint bucket filled with paint empty bucket/spilled paint boy pours paint from can into bucket boy drips paint from brush into bucket boy pours paint from can into bucket (Pour/Fill) Scenario Bz woman woman woman pours water from pours water from drips Scenario CI water from tap dumps ice cream man scoops ice cream man ice cream Scenario Cz pitcher pitcher glass glass glass into into empty into glass glass (Dump/Empty) man dumps from from from carton carton carton into bowl into bowl into bowl (Dump/Empty) Scenario DI (Dump/Empty) woman dumps salad from bowl dumps salad from bowl woman scoops salad from bowl Scenario D2 onto onto onto onto onto onto water water water glass/spilled filled with empty carton/ice cream in bowl empty carton/ice cream in bowl non-empty carton/some ice cream in bowl on table on table 'Playdo' empty bowl/salad on plate non-empty bowl/some salad empty bowl/salad on plate plate plate plate (Dump/Empty) boy dumps sand from pail boy scoops sand from pail boy dumps sand fro m pail filled with empty can/'Playdo' non-empty can/some empty can/' Playdo' girl dumps 'Playdo'* from can onto table girl dumps 'Playdo' from can onto table girl scoops 'Playdo' from can onto table woman (Endstate) sink filled with water empty sink/spilled water sink filled with water pours water from bucket into sink pours water from bucket into sink drips and (Pour/Fill) Scenario AI man sets (Manner) PANEL man Picture ACQUISITION empty pail/sand on towel empty pail/sand on towel non-empty pail/some sand towel towel towel on on on table plate towel Note: each line corresponds to a drawing composed of one manner panel andone endstate panel For each subset of three drawings (e.g AI), the first drawing was displayed before the remaining two; the second drawing was always displayed on the experimenter's right (the child's left); the third drawing was always displayed on the experimenter's left (the child's right) 'Playdo' is a registered trademark (six pictures) were used for the testing of each verb; subset was used equally often in the in an age group, each across testing of either verb of a pair For the pour/fill sets, the manner distractor depicted dripping and the endstate distractor always depicted an empty container (the contents were spilled); for the dump/empty sets, the subject, two subCsets subjects alway• Fig 3- A picture of 'pouring-filling' I24 in Experiment i I25 CHILD manner distractor always depicted a LANGUAGE always depicted scooping nofi-empty LOCATIVE and the endstate distractor container Procedure Adults were tested individually in a single session.; children were tested individually in two half-hour sessions separated by several days Two experimenters tested each child, one interacting with him or her and the other recording responses Before testing their knowledge of locative verbs, we introduced subjects to the format of the pictures by presenting them with the drawing of a boy hitting a ball with a bat and the ball breaking a •vindow Subjects were first asked to describe each panel separately, and then both panels together If subjects did not spontaneously use an appropriate causative verb (e.g break, smash) in describing the complete drawing, the experimenter modelled the sentence The boy is breaking the window During the main body of the experimental session, we tested the Verbs one at a time For each verb we began with an ambiguous picture in order to familiarize the subject with the conventions of the drawings (e.g the use of shading and a waterline to indicate the fullness of the glass) For example, the experimenter would show Fig to a subject, and say 'Look at the first picture: there's a woman, a pitcher, water, and a glass Look at the second picture there's the glass and the water Now look at both pictures when the woman does THIS (pointing to the first panel), it ends up like THAT (pointing to the second panel) And it's called FILLING THIS (gesturing towards the entire drawing) is FILLING' (In other conditions, the very same picture and commentary would be used as an example of pouring.) The experimenter would'then remove the first drawing and administer a forced-choice task involving two non'ambiguous pictures (e.g Figs and 2); this served as the test of verb semantics The constituents in each picture (i.e pair of panels) would be introduced, as above, starting with the picture on the experimenter's right Neither of these pictures would be labelled as a depiction of filling; instead, the experimenter would ask, 'Which of THESE (gesturing towards both drawings) is FILLING •' Notice that each picture preserves one panel f rom the ambiguous picture and introduces a new panel, so any systematic difference in response could not merely reflect global similarity between the original picture and either of the forced-choice alternatives If a subject did not clearly indicate either one picture or the other, the experimenter repeated the question The position of alternative pictures in the forced choices was balanced within subject so that, for the two forced choices per verb, a given type of picture (e.g 'pouring-spilling') appeared on the right as often as it did on the left Following this procedure, an elicitation task (the test of syntax) was I26 ACQUISITION administered for that verb The picture selected in the forced-choice task (whether it was correct or incorrect by adult standards) was presented to the subject, who was asked to describe what was happening in the picture We were concerned that children may have an overall response bias to use the content-object or the container-object constructions, masking any tendency they may have to extend a verb to an incorrect form if it was the less-used in two discourse contexts, one apone Therefore we elicited sentences propriate to each form For example, when the chosen picture corresponded to Fig 2, the experimenter would make the container the topic in the following way: 'Point to the glass; say GLASS say FILLING What is the woman doing to the GLASS ?' A natural response to this question is, 'She's filling it with water'-where the container argument is encoded as direct object In the same way, a content-topic query will set up a discourse context favouring a locative response with the content argument as direct object (For of the same methodology applied successfully to eliciting a discussion different dative forms, see Gropen, Pinker, Hollander, Goldberg & Wilson, I989) Furthermore, in those trials where a subject failed to produce a sentence with an unambiguous direct object, we followed it up with a prompt: 'filling what', or 'filling ?' If the prompt also did not work, we asked (e.g.) 'Is the woman filling the glass or filling the water ?' (The order of alternatives in the question was balanced across the two sets of pictures for a given verb for a given child, and counterbalanced across subjects within each age group.) In this way, we scored three kinds of response ãÂarying in degree of spontaneity in the syntactic task We balanced the order of query topic used in the testing of each verb across the subjects in an agegroup Each cycle of semantic and syntactic tests was performed twice per verb, the second time with a new set of three pictures The order of verbs itself was b•lanced across subjects in an age-group under the constraint that verbs with overlapping picture sets (e.g pour and fill) were never tested in consecutive order or within the same session In addition, the combination of verb testing order, picture s•t combinations, and query order was counterbalanced across subjects within each age group Scoring responses In the semantic test, children's were scored according to whether the chosen picture was consistent or inconsistent with the meaning of the verb as indicated by the tendencies of the adult control subjects In the syntactic task: responses were scored according to whether the direct object of a locative construction corresponded to the content or the container in the described picture To count as a locative construction, a response had to specify both the appropriate verb and an unambiguous direct object The I27 CHILD kind of question needed to elicit the locative ••esponse was also scored; that is, whether the subject responded to the original elicitation, the subsequent prompt (e.g Filling what '), or the forced-choice question (e.g Filling the glass or filling the water ') Subjects often used pronouns in their responses for example, in answering What is the woman doing to the glass ?' a subject might respond, 'She's filling it' These utterances were counted only if the referent of the pronoun was disambiguated by the presence of an oblique object or particle (e.g She poured it into the glass or She poured it out), or the referent could be pinned down via the subsequent prompt Responses which were undecipherable or not clearly locative (e.g intransitive responses such as She's pouring with the water) were excluded RESULTS Syntax AND -ACQUISITION fill were not just responses to follow-up prompts The original request to describe the picture elicited many fill-content sentences, and the statistical comparisons remain significant when restricted to these responses Since empty is an alternator, strictly speaking children cannot make errors with it However, Table shows that the children had a consistent preference for the content-object form, which contrasts with adults, who used both forms equally often Across the child groups, the difference between the proportion of trials eliciting content-object sentences and container-object 2"06, p < 0"05) sentences (0"23) was significant (t (47) Children were clearly sensitive to whether the original query focused on LOCATIVE LANGUAGE DISCUSSION produced Table shows the proportion of trials in which subjects contentand container-object sentences with each verb in response to content-topic and container-topic eliciting questions, Not surprisingly, adults used pour and dump almost exclusively in content-object sentences (only two subjects produced dump-container forms, one apiece), and they used fill almost exclusively in container-object sentences (0nly one fill-content form was produced by an adult) Empty, in contrast, is clearly an alternator- eight adults used it in both locative forms, and four adults each used it in only one or the other form Children could deviate from adults' responses in two ways: they could use fill in content-object sentences, pour in container-object sentences, or dump in container-object sentences Of these potential errors, children were much likely to produce the nonstandard fill form than the other two: 3o more children out of 48 produced at least one fill-content form, whereas only two children produced at least one pour-container form and only six children produced at least one dump-container form The tendency to produce fillcontent forms declines with age the mean proportion of trials eliciting such forms goes from o'53 in the young and middle groups to o'34 in the older group aod o'o3 in adults, and this difference is significant in an ANOVA (F (3, 6o) 6"63, p < o'ooi) A series of planned one-tailed t-tests shows that, for each of the child groups compared separately to the adult group, there is in the proportion of fill-content responses (fro m a significant difference (3o) 4"5o, P < o'ooi t (3o) youngest to oldest, t (3o) 4"5o, P < o'ooi 3"oi, p < o'oo3) Although the oldest children produced fewer fill-content forms (I utterances) than the younger children (i utterances for each of the younger groups), a post-hoc comparison reveals that this difference is not significant (two-tailed t (46) I'48, p o'I4) As Table shows, errors with the container or on the content For the alternator empty, there was a content-object sentences in response to content-topic difference o'41) and a preference to use container-object o'o6), sentences in response to container-object queries (mean difference lO'87, p < o'oo5) The effect can also be a significant difference (F (I, 60) seen with the non-alternating verb dump, for which container-object errors exclusively in response to container-topic questions (Fillwere produced content errors were produced equally often in response to content, and container-topic questions.) preference to queries (mean use Semantics In order to assess subjects' interpretations of particular verbs, we adopted the criterion" if a subject chose the same type of picture (manner or both semantic tests for a given verb, then he or she was on considered biased towards that aspect of the verb's meaning Table summarizes the number of biased subjects in each age group Totals that are significantly greater than chance (o'5 x o'5 x 16 4/16 subjects) at p < o'o5 accbrding to the binomial distribution are underlined The data reveal markedly different performance for pour and dump versus fill and empty expected, adults unanimously treated pour and dump as having more todo with a manner of motion than with a change of state, and fill and empty as having more to with a change of state than a manner of motion The number of children who were biased towards the adult interpretations of pour and dump is significantly higher than chance for every age group (p < o'o5) In contrast, forfill and empty we fail to find a significant number for children biased towards the change of state interpretations, and instead find that some groups of children were biased towards INCORRECT meanings for the verbs Specifically, in the semantic test for fill eight of the oldest children (out of 16)consistently chose pictures showing a pouring manner without a full endstate (p < o,o3) In addition, in every child-group more children than would be expected by chance (though not significantly so) showed a bias towards choosing incorrect pictures for empty (i.e a dumping following endstate) •As 129 JCL 18 CHILD T A B L E LANGUAGE LOCATIVE Experiment Proportion of trials in which subjects content-object and container-object sentences used verbs in 4" TABLE ACQUISITION towards i" Number of subjects biased endstate interpretations of verbs Experiment AGE-GROUP VERB-FORM 6 AGE Pour o'94 1"oo 1"oo I'OO 0"88 1"oo i.oo 1"oo Mean 0"91 1,oo 1"oo 1.oo (I8/IO/I) Container-object sentences Content-topic query Container-topic query 0.o6 Mean (29/3/0) (29/3/0) o'oo o'oo o'oo o" 12 o.oo o'oo o'oo 0"09 o'oo o'oo o'oo (11210) Manner bias Pour Mean 1"oo i'oo i'oo I'OO o'81 o'94 o'88 o'97 o'94 o'94 (I9/IO/I) Container-object sentences Content-topic query Container-topic query Mean o'91 (27121 ° (26/4/I) Mean Container-object sentences Content-topic query Container-topic query Mean Empty Content-object sentences Content-topic query Container-topic query Mean Container-object sentences Content-topic query Container-topic query Mean 8_ manner • I6 frequencies are 0 7 5 significantly o 17 17 greater than chance, at • • p < 0"05, according to test without an empty endstate) altogether i9 out of the 48 children did significant proportion (p < o'o2, binomial test) These data suggest that a child may be more likely to think that the meaning of fill involves pouring than that it involves something being made full; likewise that empty involves dumping rather than that it involvessomething being made emptyl Presumably this is due to two factors The first is a bias toward picking up manner components of meaning, as suggested by Gentner (I978) This overall bias can be demonstrated by aggregating data over the set of four verbs, which was balanced for manner-oriented and endstate-oriented meanings, and comparing the difference between the proportion of manner and endstate responses for adults and children Adults showed no overall bias (the mean difference between manner and endstate responses was o'I2, not significantly different from zero), whereas children did: their difference scores were all significantly different from zero (young 0"28, (I5) ='3"2o, p < o"oi mid 0"39, (I5) 4"28, p < o'ooi old 5"26, p < o"ooi) The second factor is the statistical pattern 0"52, (I5) cause-and-effect of sequences in the world, whereby pouring is a typical and dumping is a typical means of effecting fullness effecting of means so-a o'oo o'oo o'oo o'oo z o" 19 o'o9 o'o6 o" 12 o'o3 o.o6 o" o.o6 (21010) (I/I/I) ,(I/O/O) 0"56 0"62 0"44 0"53 o'19 0"50 0"34 0"06 0"50 0"53 0"94 0"94 o.94 Fill Content-object sentences Content-topic query Container,topic query I4 • o z binomial 16) x_• I_• Note: Underlined Adult (N 16) 4o 4o Fill 5 (N 16) Empty Dump Combined children 11 (N Endstate bias Pour a 6-5 • I.• Fill o'88 4; • 5t Dump Empty Content-object sentences Content-topic query Container-topic query 16) (N Content-object sentences Content-topic query Container-topic query 6-4; (N 16) or GROUP Adult 6-3 manner (9/8/0) (9/7/1) 0"44 0"50 0"31 0"75 o'44 0"44 o'59 o'47 (5/6/0) 0"56 (4/10/1) (IO/I/3) (9/9/1) 0"69 0"69 0"56 0"69 0"50 0"59 0"50 0"59 0"62 (6/8/5) (12/7/I) 0"31 0"44 0"31 o" 0"34 0.50 o'41 (I3/6/o) 0"38 0"38 (5/5/2) 130 (4/4/3) (I 31 I/!/i o'oo 0"03 0"75 0"25 0"50 0"75 0.50 0"2 Note: The numerals in parentheses in Table correspond to the frequencies of sentences used in response to the ,original question, the subsequent prompt, and the forced-choice question, respectively Adults always responded to the original question For the trials on a given verb performed by each group, total proportions may be less than l'OO and total frequencies may be less than 32 because of discarded responses 131 5-2 CHILD LANGUAGE emptiness Adults know that these causal world, not facts about the semantics of fill connections or empty are TABLE Experiment empty' i" Contingency and kinds Contingencies between semantic and syntactic errors We have suggested that children's syntax errors are the product of correct linking rules operating on incorrect semantic with this suggestion is the finding that the kinds representations Consistent of verbs that children use in incorrect syntactic frames in spontaneous speech and in the syntax test (fill and empty) are the same verbs that children misinterpreted in the semantics test, with just the kind of bias (towards manner) that would result in incorrect content-object sentences In contrast, pour and dump were rarely the sources of either syntactic or semantic errors A much more stringent test can b6 conducted by seeing if the tendency towards semantic and syntactic errors is correlated across individual children For each age group and verb we constructed a × contingency table, each child contributing one count, classifying children according to their semantic bias and their syntactic errors For fill, each child was classified as either biased towards the pouring manner or biased towards the full endstate based on performance in the semantics test, and was independently classified either having produced as at least one content-object form among his or her transitive sentences with fill, or as having produced no such errors, in the syntax test (One child who produced no transitive sentences with fill was excluded.) This analysis is shown in Table Only the oldest children (4;6-5;x•) showed any tendency toward contingency in the predicted direction (i.e being more likely to produce a fill-content errors TABLE 5" Produced at 2;6-3;5: Manner biased biased l•ndstat•e 3;6-4;5: Manner biased Endstate biased Manner Endstate Combined Manner Endstate if they were Experiment I" Contingency between bias in the interpretation of 'fill' and grammatical errors in sentences with 'fill' content-object biased biased children biased biased 132 least one Produced content-object no sentences of between bias in the interpretation of sentences used Produced only content-object sentences with empty' Produced container-object only sentences z;6-3;5: Manner biased Endstate biased 3;6-4;5: Manner biased Endstate biased o 4;6-5;I•: Manner Endstate Combined Manner Endstate biased biased children biased biased o o I4 biased toward a manner interpretation forfi//), but this contingency was only marginally significant in a Z test (Z" (I) 3"o9; p < o-o8) and not significant by a Fisher Exact Test (one-tailed p o-i2) Table displays a similar test that was conducted for performance with empty Because both forms are grammatical for adults, for the syntactic dimension each child is classified in terms of whether he or she produced only empty-content forms or only empty-container forms Here the contingency is the right direction for all three age groups, and is significant for the combined group of children according to a Fisher Exact test (one tailed p < o'o2): a child who is biased toward a manner interpretation for empty will tend to produce whereas sentence ACQUISITION LOCATIVE facts about the produce empty-content sentences than empty-container sentences child who is biased towards an endstate interpretation will tend to more a more container-object contingencies between encouraging, if somewhat less The sentences semantic biases and syntactic forms are than conclusive, particularly for fi// Apart from the fact that our samples were very small (two responses per measure per child) in comparison to the noisiness of children's behaviour, there are two reasons why we may have underestimated the degree of contingency present in children's grammars First, even if children assign irrelevant manner features to a verb's meaning, there is tested for no guarantee that the exact manner feature that children hypothesize Pouringwe seemed a plausible, candidate but one alternative is that children think that filling requires the top surface of a substance to move higher and higher during the course of the action; such a manner of motion would in fact be compatible with the panel depicting the full-container endstate Second, subjects were I33 CHILD LANGUAGE always forced to choose between depiction of but not filling and a depiction of filling but not pouring.a Perhaps pouring some children think that filling must involve a full endstate AND a pouring manner but when forced to choose the more important one they go for the full endstate It might be the LOCATIVE ACQUISITION nine months earlier) Four children were replaced in the design because of their unwillingness or inability to perform the semantic task mere presence of a manner component, not the absence of an endstate component, that causes content-object errors, but our task pitted them against each other rather than testing each one separately The second experiment attempts to deal with this limitation, EXPERIMENT The main purpose of this experiment is to distinguish a BIAS toward manner or endstate interpretations of a verb when they are pitted against each other, from a SENSITIVITY to each component when tested individually, That is, rather than asking whether filling is more important to the or pouring meaning of fill, we ask whether filling is relevant to the meaning of fill, and separately, whether pouring is relevant to the meaning of fill Our approach in this experiment is to perform detailed a although case study of the we acknowledge that a case study of one verb is limited by its believe that it can be valuable, especially when interpreted very nature, we in conjunction with studies in which more verbs are tested in a less detailed fashion (e.g Experiment i), In addition, we test a somewhat older group of children spanning a wider age-range, in an attempt to see clearer age trends, and introduce several minor methodological improvements The improvements include using three-panel pictures, some of them with contents and containers coloured in, and dispensing with the practice of initially an ambiguous drawing before each forced choice These changes presenting adopted in order to lessen the possibility that children might misinterpretare the stimulus materials for the semantic test for example, by ignoring the endstate panel simply because they not understand the format or conventions of the drawings, or because of any possible •esponse bias towards the 'original' Verbfill; •/laterials In the semantic task, each subject was shown •2 pairs of pictures; in the each subject was shown four actions, each involving one of four contents and one of four containers Each picture used in this experiment was composed of three panels, corresponding to the beginning, middle and end states of an action In a picture of 'pouring-spilling' (Fig 4), for example, the first panel shows a woman pouring water from a pitcher, with a small puddle appearing next to an empty glass; the second panel shows her continuing to pour with a larger puddle next to the empty glass; in the third panel the woman has gone, leaving behind an even larger puddle next to the empty glass In a picture of 'dripping-filling' (Fig 5), the first panel shows a woman turning on a tap, allowing water to drip from the spigot into a half-filled glass; the second syntactic task, Fig 4- A picture of 'pouring-spilling' in Experiment Fig A picture in Experiment manner METHOD Subject's Sixty-four English living in the Boston p•rticipated(eight boys, eight girls) aged 3;5 to 4;6 (mean areao), sixteen (six boys, Io girls) aged 4; to 6;6 (mean 5;7), sixteen (• boys,4; four 6; io to 8;9 (mean 7;9), and •6 paid undergraduate and graduate girls) aged students at MIT The children were drawn from middle-class day-care and after-school programs, and four of them had participated in Experiment (not less than native speakers of •6 children of 'dripping-filling' I34 I35 CHILD TABLE LOCATIVE LANGUAGE Manners and endstates contrasted in the semantic tests Experiment OF TEST Manner sensitivity Endstate sensitivity Bias PICTURE Manner Endstate Manner Endstate pouring pouring pouring pouring pouring dripping dripping dripping pouring pouring dripping dripping full empty full 3/4- full empty full dripping dripping full empty 3/4- full empty full 3/4- full empty full 3/4-full empty full full full full of PICTURE TYPE ACQUISITION pouring pouring pouring dripping dripping dripping dripping dripping pouring pouring empty empty empty empty panel shows her continuing to allow water to drip into the glass, now threequarters filled; in the third panel she has gone, leaving behind a full glass The i2 pairs of pictures shown to each subject were designed to test three types of knowledge about the meaning of fill Two tested sensitivity to particular manners; six tested sensitivity to particular endstates; and four tested bias towards particular manners or endstates when they are pitted against each other These tests are summarized in Table The manner sensitivity test contrasted pouring and dripping choice was presented twice to each subject, one where both alternatives depicted an empty container (the contents spilled) and one where both alternatives depicted a full container Tt•e One of the endstate sensitivity tests contrasted full and empty, as in the last experiment: one picture showed an empty container (with successive panels showing puddles of increasing size) and the other depicted a full container (with successive panels showing a half-full, three-quarters-full, and full container) Other endstate sensitivity tests were de'signed to distinguish between two ways in which subjects might be sensitive to the 'fullness' component of fill: the container might have to end up completely full, or it might have to become increasingly full over time, though not necessarily completely full at the end (this roughly corresponds to Vendler's (I957) distinction between ACCOMPLISHMENT and ACTIVITY meanings) In these tests, subjects were shown a picture culminating in a three-quarters-full container (with successive panels showing a quarter-full, half-full and threequarters-full container; see Fig 6), which was contrasted with a picture culminating in an empty container, or with a picture culminating in a full 136 Fig A picture of 'pouring-3/4-full container' in Experiment pictures used in endstate sensitivity tests, the coloured in to make them more salient.) If a were subject views filling as requiring that a container be completely full, he or she should always choose the full containers over the three-quarter-full containers; if a subject views filling as requiring only that a container become increasingly full, he or she should always choose the full and three-quartersfull containers over the empty containers, but should not consistently choose the full containers over the three-quarter-full containers (because both of these containers become increasingly full by the same amount-half a container's worth of content) Each endstate contrast (e.g a full container vs an empty container) was presented once with a pouring manner in both pictures and once •with a dripping manner in both pictures, yielding a total of six endstate trials per subject The bias tests contrasted the pouring and dripping manners and the empty-container and full-container endstates simultaneously Subjects were shown two contrasts: between 'pouring-spilling' and 'dripping-filling' (a replication of the bias test in Experiment i); and between 'pouring-filling' and 'dripping-Spilling ' Within subject, each of these contrasts was presented twice, resulting in four bias trials As in Experiment i, four different scenarios (involving a particular agent, content and container) were used, summarized in Table In pairing picture sets with particular tests of verb meaning, we divided the set of 12 tests into four subsets: the manner contrast with a full container as the endstate, and the two bias contrasts; the manner contrast with an empty container as the endstate, and the two bias contrasts (repeated); the three endstate contrasts with pouring as the manner the three endstate contrasts with dripping as the We counterbalanced the combination of picture set (i.e set of manner participants depicted) and meaning-test subset across subjects within an agecontainer contents (Note that in all the and containers group I37 CHILD LANGUAGE LOCATIVE rather In the syntax test, real events than pictures were used These events involved marbles and pennies, which could be put into bowl jar, and a apple juice and grape juice, which could be put into a glass or or a cup Procedure As before, the semantics tests preceded the syntax test Both were administered in a single session by two experimenters, one interacting with the child, the other recording data This time there was no separate introduction to the format of the pictures The semantic trials consisted of Z forced choices between pictures For each forced choice, the experimenter placed the pair of drawings directly in front of the subject and talked him her through each drawing For the children, the experimenter first had the orchild identify each of the depicted entities in each pan•l, by saying, for example, 'Look at the first picture (Fig 4): point to the woman; point to the pitcher; point to the water; point to the glass Now look at the second picture (Fig 5): point to the woman; point to the tap; point to the water; point to the glass ' If a child failed to point to the relevant entity, the experimenter would so Then the experimenter would say (to adults as well as to children) 'this is the beginning (points to first panel), the middle (second panel), and the end (third panel) When the woman does THIS (sweeps finger,across first and second panels), it ends up like THAT (points to third panel)' Finally, after both series of panels had been reviewed, the experimenter would ask, 'Which of THESE (gesturing toward both drawings) is FILLING ?' If necessary, the question was repeated The order in which the i2 pairs of forced choices were presented randomized separately for each subject within an age-group We ruled was out orders that resulted in two consecutive trials involving the same scenario, two consecutive trials testing the same contrast, or three consecutive trials testing the same type of contrast (manner sensitivity, endstate sensitivity, or bias) In addition, for each presentation of a given contrast, each drawing was presented once on the right and once on the left Each subject then participated in the syntax test, comprising four opportunities to produce sentences with fill The procedure to was designed increase the chances of eliciting full locative sentences with prepositional phrases Each trial involved two potential contents two potential containers, only one of which actually participated in orthe event Discourse factors should encourage subjects to utter a prepositional phrase in order identify the content or container actually used (Crain, Thornton & Murasugito (1987) found that this kind of task was successful in eliciting passives with full by-phrases from children.) Furthermore, subjects were asked to describe the action for the benefit of a-.blindfolded puppet, encouraging explicitness As before, in each trial children were given questions that focused the content 138 ACQUISITION and questions that focused the container For example, subjects were told I'm gonna some filling, and I want you to tell Marry the Puppet what I'm doing Here are some marbles I can have either a jug or a bowl Now watch this: I'm filling (fills jar with marbles)., :'Can you tell Marty what I did to the MARBLES ?' Notice that a pragmatically natural response in this context (standard syntax aside) is a content-object form, (e,g,) You filled the marbles into the JAa', where the old information (topic) is encoded as the direct object and the new information is encoded as the oblique object An example in which a container is made the topic is the following: 'Here is a glass, I can have either grape juice or apple juice Now watch this: I*m filling (fills the glass with apple juice) Can you tell Marty what did to the GLASS ?' Here the appropriate response is 'You filled the glass with APPLE JUICE' If a subject failed to use an unambiguous direct object (or used a verb other than fill), the experimenter repeated the query, reminding the subject that Marry could not see (or telling the subject to 'use the word fill') As in Experiment i, this was followed, if necessary, by asking 'filling (what) ', and then, if necessary, by asking filling the glass or filling the apple juice (with the order of items balanced within subject) Four orders of trials within the syntactic task were employed across the subjects within an age-group The orders were determined by the factorial combination of whether subjects began the task with the solid materials or the liquid materials, alternating thereafter, and whether the order of query topics was content-container-container-content or container-content-content-container Each of the four contents and containers was used once and only once for a given subject The pairing of solid contents and containers (i.e marbles-bowl and pennies-jar vs, marbles-jar and pennies-bowl) was counterbalanced with the pairing of liquid contents and containers (counting whether the content or container of each material type was the topic) to yield 16 unique combinations of materials and query topics across the subjects within an age group In addition, these pairings of content and container the order of syntactic trials across subjects within were counterbalanced with an age group Scoring Responses in the semantic task were scored according to the manner and/or endstate of the chosen drawing in each forced choice trial, depending on which of these components was contrasted For the syntax test, responses scored according to whether the direct object of a locative form were corresponded to the content or the container (Acceptable locative forms included two passives (e.g the glass •vas filled up), and two unaccusative intransitives (e.g the glass filled •vith marbles) In each case the glass was scored as the underlying direct object; see Perlmutter, 1978; Burzio, 1986.) 139 !'11 1•1•011ii11|i# pho•b[• or j•dca) w•re •r• tlOt I,I) I, ANGUAGE LOCATIVE tm in Experiment I Responses that were undecilocative (e.g intransitives such as she' s filling with the trÂãted clearly excluded As in Experiment i, also scored were ,•ceording to whether they were elicited by theresponses original question, by the subsequent prompt, or by a forced-choice question RESULTS DISCUSSION AND Syntax Table shows produced as a the proportion of fill-content and fill-container forms function of query topic and age-group As in Experiment i, generally unwilling to produce sentences with the content argument as the direct object, with the exception of one adult who did so once In contrast, 34 out of the 48 children, a majority within each age group, produced at least one fill-content form An ANOVA on the mean proportion of content-object sentences across all four groups reveals a significant main effect of age (F (3, 60) 8"57, P < o'ooi), and planned comparisons (at onetailed p < o'o5) show that each group of children produced significantly more fill-content forms than did the adults (youngest; (30) 5"o8, p < o'ooi; middle: (3o) 4"48, P < o-ooi oldest: (30) P < o-ooz) We also found, as in Experiment i, that the oldest children (here between 6; and 8;9) produced fewer fill-content forms than did younger children, this•o time significantly so (t (46) z-z6, two-tailed p C 0"05) adults were =3"34, TABLE Experiment content- Proportion of trials in which subjects object and container- object sentences 2" used 'fill' in AGE-GROUP Content-object sentences Content-topic query Container-topic query Mean 3;5-4;6 4;9-6;6 6;lO-8;9 °'53 o'53 o'47 °'5o o'38 o'o3 o" 12 o'oo (16/o/o) o'25 o'o2 o'97 o'47 °'5° (22/10/O) Container-object sentences Coil.tent-topic query Container-topic query Mean (z7/5/o) o'38 o-38 o-59 °'47 °'4• o'5o 0"44 o'88 0"73 (25/2/0) (28/0/0) (46/1/O) Adult l"OO 0"98 Note: The numerals in parentheses correspond to the frequencies of sentences used in response to the original question, the subsequent prompt, and the forced-choice question, respectively Adults always responded to the original question For child group, total proportions are less than I'OO and total frequencies are less than 64each because of discarded responses I40 ACQUISITION These patterns are also clear in responses to the original request to describe the actions (see the frequencies in Table 8), not just in the follow-ups Adults produced significantly fewer fill-content forms (mean o-o2) than did any of (3 o) 4"27, P < o'ooi the individual child groups (mean young 0"34, old 3"87, (3o) middle 3"34, o'25, (3o) P < o-ooi mean o'42, mean topic: discourse the sensitive Children's o'oo2) to as utterances were p < expected, more fill-content forms were produced in response to the contenttopic query (mean o'37) than to the container-topic query (mean o'27), 6"48, p < o'o2 F (I, 6o) Semantics Table summarizes subjects' choices among pictures corresponding to different meaning components for fill The frequency of subjects displaying of preferences is underlined if it is significantly greater a particular pattern chance, than at p < o'o5, according to the binomial distribution The table also summarizes the magnitude of subjects' preferences for one kind of picture over another by displaying the mean difference between the proportions of standard and non-standard responses under each pair of possible preferences Sensitivity to particular endstates As Table shows, significant numbers of children displayed adult-like sensitivity to the endstate meaning component of fill by choosing the full container over the empty container, the full container over the three-quarters-full container, and the three-quarters-full container over the empty container Each of these proportions was significantly above chance for each age group (though marginally so, at p < o'o9, for the mid,aged children on the full/three-quarters-full contrast), as was the frequency of children showing adult-like preferences in all three choices Adult-like preferences across all three choices combined can be seen to increase with age (from 37"5 •/o of the youngest children to 6z'5 % of the oldest children and 94% of the adults) ANOVAs on the mean difference between proportions of standard and non-standard responses for each endstate sensitivity test reveal a significant effect of age group only for the full-empty contrast (F (3, 60) 3"o•, P < o'o5) The mean difference between the proportions of 'full' and 'empty' responses is greater for the adults (mean i'oo) than for the youngest children (marginally: mean o'8i; (3 o) i'86, p < o'o8) or for the mid-aged children (mean o'44; (3o) •'76, P < o'o•) This pattern of results that the youngest and mid-aged children were less sensitive to endstate than were the adults was also found in significant or marginally significant post-hoc tests for the contrasts between full' and 'three-quarters-full' and between 'three-quarters-full' and 'empty' Although the mid-aged children appear to perform worse than 141 CHILD T A B L E LOCATIVE LANGUAGE three-quarters-full containers In fact, the difference in performance on these tests was significant for the youngest children (mean proportion for 0"78, mean pro'full' and 'three-quarters-full' over 'empty' responses 'three-quarters-full' o'5o, two-tailed responses portion for 'full' over Experiment Number of subjects displaying consistent preferences between pictures in the semantic task 9" over AGE-GROUP 3;5-4;6 (N= •6) CRITERIA sensitivity (0'25, 8) empty > full (0"25, 8) mean difference in proportion 4;9-6;6 (N= I6) 6; lO-8;9 (N= I6) empty > • o of o'8i choices (N= I6) > 3/4-full (0"25, 8) 3/4-full > full (0"25, 8) difference in _8 o proportion of 0"5o choi_ces 3/4-full empty > > empty (0"25, 8) • 3/4-full (o'25, 8) difference in proportion of choices full > empty, full > 3/4.full, & 3/4-full > empty (o'oi56 2) mean difference in proportion of choices full > empty & 3/4-full >empty mean (O'O625, 4) difference in choices Manner sensitivity mean pouring dripping mean 0"44 • i •6 2"18, p < for their purposes o 0"75 i'oo sensitivity Table also shows the number of subjects who were consistent in choosing one manner or another A significant number of the mid-aged children (9/I6; p < o'oI), oldest children (I5/I6; p < o'ooI), and adults (I3/I6; p < o'ooi) showed a preference for pouring over dripping as the best manner for filling For the youngest children this preference was only marginally significant (7/I6, p < o'o8) The number of subjects displaying the opposite preference was less than would be expected by chance in all age difference between the progroups Across groups, comparing the mean dripping and pouring portions of responses, we found significant differences o'12) and the adults (mean o'8i, (mean children the between youngest (3o) 2"83i-.p < o'oI), between the youngest children and the oldest children (mean o'94, (3o) 3"53, P < o'oo2), and between the mid-aged children (mean o'5o) and the oldest children (t (3o) 2"57, P < o'o2) Note that the sensitivity tests not distinguish properties of an action that are essential to the meaning of a verb from those that are merely typical Thus the fact that 13 adults consistently chose the pouring manner over the dripping manner in this test only implies that pouring is regarded asa BETTER dripping, not that pouring is essential to it Indeed, only means of filling than three adults (out of 16) completed both manner sensitivity trials without any reservation; the remainder either hesitated or commented to the experimenter that the difference between pouring and dripping was not Manner full mean j_•o 0"05) This may be due to the youngest children being more that the container become increasingly full than requirement sensitiv.e to the end it that up completely full alternatively, the youngest to the requirement full' likely be children may to consider a three-quarters-full glass to be more (15) Adult Endstate full ACQUISITION proportion of dripping (0'25, 8) pouring (0"25, 8) difference in proportion > > choices Bias full (0"0625,4) empty (o'o625, 4) pouring (0"0625, 4) dripping (0'0625, 4) of 0"75 9, o'38 r L •5 0"56 o'88 i. •i i.• 16 0"56 o o 0"88 I"oo o'46 9"73 0"96 o'69 i_•_o o'78 I.•O o'5o I.•2 o'8I I6 I'oo O O o'I 0"50 0"94 0"8 7 o 16 o o o o o o o essential the youngest children in these two contrasts, this dip disappears if we consider their performance on both of these tests combined or on all three tests combined Children were more likely to choose pictures of full and three-quarters-full containers over empty containers than to choose pictures of full containers subject consistently chose the 'pouring-filling' picture over the 'dripping-spilling' picture and the 'pouring-spilling' picture over the dripping-filling' picture, he or she was classified as biased towards a pouring meaning component of fill Similarly, subjects manner as the more important would be classified as biased towards a dripping manner if they consistently made the opposite choices Subjects were classified as biased toward a fullcontainer endstate if they consistently chose the 'pouring-filling' picture 'dripping-spilling' picture and the 'dripping-filling' picture over over the picture, and biased toward an empty-container end'pouring-spilling' the made the opposite choices consistently they if state 142 143 symbol indicates the pattern of preference frequencies significantly greater than o'o5) are underlined The probability of a single subject displaying a consistent preference across the trials involving a given comparison, and the o:o5 cut-off for frequency greater than chance, are listed in parentheses Note The chance (p > < Bias If a CHILD LANGUAGE Table shows that the current experiment clearly replicates the first significant number of the youngest (5 out of •6) and mid-aged childrenone:(6 a out of 6) were biased towards a pouring manner interpretation, despite the fact that there were also significant numbers of subjects in each group who were biased towards a full-container endstate interpretation Thus different children of the same age may assign different weights to the manner and endstate components of the meaning of fill One of the interesting differences between the results of the bias and manner sensitivity tests is that bias towards the pouring manner DECREASES markedly from the youngest and mid-aged children to the oldest children (only the younger groups being biased), whereas sensitivity to the pouring manner INCaEASES significantly from the youngest and mid-aged children to the oldest children (means of o'xz, o'5o and o'94 respectively; for oldest versus youngest, p < o'oo2; for oldest versus mid, p < o-o2) Apparently, children become increasingly sensitive to the stereotypical manner associated with some verb, while also becomingless subject to the misconception that such a manner is essential to the meaning of the verb For a young child, if a verb has a characteristic manner, that manner is a necessary part of the meaning of a verb This can be seen by the trend whereby the ratio of the children who are both pouring-sensitive and pouring-biased to the children who are only pouring-sensitive drops from o'57 (4/7) to o-55 (5/9) to o'zo (3/•5) for groups of increasing age In sum, subjects of every age group were sensitive to the full-container endstate requirement of fill and to the fact that pouring is the characteristic manner for filling, though the latter sensitivity in the was weak children However, although a significant number of subjects of younger every agegroup were correctly biased towards the full-container endstate as the most important meaning component of fill, there was also a significant number of younger children (3 5-6 6) who displayed an incorrect bias toward a pouring manner as the most important meaning component Thus the main developmental trend we see in the acquisition of the meaning of fill is realizing a verb can have a CHARACTERISTIC manner that is not a NECESSARY This phenomenon is reminiscent of Keil's (• 986) demonstration that manner children shift from representing a word meaning in terms of the characteristic features of its referents to representing it in terms of its defining features For children below the age of seven think that an uncle is nice a man who drinks beer with one's father, even if he is not the father's brother, and that a two-year-old cannot be one's uncle, even if he is one's father's brother Older children make the opposite choices exampJe, I44 LOCATIVE ACQUISITION Contingencies between semantic and syntactic errors As in Experiment •, we can ascertain whether children who were more likely to think that fill requires a.pouring manner were also more likely to produce syntactic errors with the content argument as direct object In this case, we have measures both of children's relative bias between manner and endstate components, and of their sensitivity to each Strictly speaking, a bias toward object affectedness linking a manner interpretation is not necessary for the rule to yield content-object errors, since a person may incorrectly require a verb to have a manner component, but opt for the endstate component if forced to choose between them Nor is sensitivity to manner sufficient to lead to such errors, since a person may know that a manner is typically associated with a verb, while not requiring it to be satisfied in every case (indeed, we suggest that our adult subjects are in this category) Thus, unfortunately, we have no pure measure of semantic knowledge that is expected to predict syntactic errors perfectly; the closest is the side remarks by most of our adult subjects that while they preferred pouring to dripping (like the children), pouring was not necessary for filling to occur However, we suggest that the following test is informative For the two younger groups of children, significant numbers were biased in choosing the pouring manner over the full endstate Therefore those are the ages at which children who are sensitive to the pouring manner are also likely to interpret the pouring manner as a necessary component of the meaning of fill (even if it is not as important to them as the endstate component, and hence would not show up in the bias test for every child) Therefore it is within those age ranges that children who should be more likely to produce are sensitive to a pouring manner for fill ungrammatical content-object sentences than children who show no sensitivity to the pouring manner The older group, which contains children who are sensitive to a pouring manner but not are not biased towards it, does not differ qualitatively from adults; their sensitivity scores may not be diagnostic of a belief that pouring is necessary to the meaning of fill and the scores in turn may not be predictive of syntactic errors We constructed x contingency tables, with each child contributing one score to a table On the semantic dimension, a child is classified as sensitive to a pouring manner if he or she chose pouring over dripping in both of the sensitivity tests; otherwise, the child is scored as insensitive to a manner pouring manner On the syntactic dimension, a child is classified as either producing at least one fill-content form, or producing no fill-content forms The contingency tables are presented in Table •o Although no significant contingencies were found for the separate child groups or for the combined child group (3 5-8 9), the Fisher Exact Test for the mid-aged children approached significance (p < o'o8) Moreover, within the combined group of youngest and mid-aged children there was a •45 CHILD TABLE 10 Exp eriment interpretation of 'fill' z: LOCATIVE LANGUAGE contingency between sensitivity to grammatical errors in sentences and Produced at content-object 3;5-4;6 Pouring-sensitive Pouring-insensitive 4;9-6;6 Pouring- sensitive Pouring-insensitive 6; lO-8;9 Pouring- sensitive Pouring- insensitive Youngest and mid-aged children (3 5-6 6) Pouring•sensitive Pouring- insensitive Combined children (3 5-8 9) Pouring- sensitive Pouring-insensitive- least one sentence manner with Produced content-object o in the 'fill' no sentences o 24 o 7 significant contingency (one-tailed Fisher Exact test p < o'oz) Thus, children between and 6 who are sensitive to a pouring manner as part of the meaning of fill will tend to produce errors where the object of fill is a content argument more than children of those ages who show no sensitivity to a pouring manner The evidence for contingencies between semantic choices and syntactic errors across individual children is not conclusive, but it has turned up three different times (with fill among the 4;6-5; 1-year-old children in Experiment 1, with empty in the z 6-5 i-year-old children in Experiment i, and with fill in the 5-6 6-year-old children in Experiment z) Given how crude the analyses were, it is not surprising that the effects were not strong: with a small number of responses per task, random factors such as attentional lapses or position biases can destroy consistency, and as mentioned, we cannot be sure that we have tested any misinterpretations other than _the obvious one corresponding to pouring Furthermore, a misinterpretation of the meaning of fill may not be an all-or-none trait that some children make and others not, but a continuous tendency, and our measures were dichotomous Thus it is fortunate that we are able to see any degree of contingency across children at all GENERAL We have DISCUSSION proposed ness, to map an that children use a universal linking rule, object affectedargument onto the direct object role if it is specified as 1•6 ACQUISITION affected in some particular way in a verb's semantic representation But children must learn which arguments of which verbs are specified as 'affected ', so they may at some point during language acquisition have inaccurate semantic representations for particular verbs Because children manner-of-motion components of meaning than seem to be more sensitive to to change-of-state components (Gentner, I978), they should be prone to making errors whereby change-of-state verbs like fill are misinterpreted as specifying a manner of motion Such misinterpretations would then lead to the syntactic errors such as I filled the water into the glass documented by Bowerman (1982) where the content argument is encoded as direct object The syntactic error would be unlearned as the child revises his or her interpretation of the verb's meaning by encountering situations in which the incorrect manner component is falsified, such as when fill is used in conjunction with dripping or bailing• The results of two experiments lend support to this theory In both experiments we have replicated Bowerman's finding based on spontaneous speech that children are apt,to make syntactic errors with verbs like fill, reflecting a general preference for content-object sentences that also manifests itself in their u•ing mostly content-object forms for the alternating verb empty Again replicating Bowerman, we found that children make fewer syntactic errors where content-object verbs like pour and dump are used in container-object constructions We discovered that children are likely to misinterpret the meanings of the kinds of verbs that they make syntactic overapplication of the linking rule would errors with, in the direction that predict Although all groups of children between z;6 and 8;6 realize that fill has something to with a container being made full, and that this state is better accomplished by pouring than by other manners of motion, until about 6;6 children are likely to think that the pouring manner is an essential part of the meaning of fill rather than merely typical of it Conversely, the verbs that are used with few syntactic errors, pour and dump, are not prone to semantic misinterpretation Finally, for children in the age-range in which typical manners are misinterpreted as being essential, we have found some evidence that individual children who are more likely to be sensitive to typical manners are also more likely to make the predicted syntactic errors We conclude that systematic misinterpretations of particular verbs, coupled with universal linking rules, may account for the occurrence of the syntactic errors Although we have been able to exploit a naturally-occurring manner bias in order to show a correlation of syntactic and semantic errors, the question remains as to whether or not a causal relation holds The alternative is that children use the syntactic properties of verbs to predict their meanings (Landau & Gleitman, 1985; Pinker, 1989) Though children presumably direction, it is unlikely that they are doing so in the use linking rules in this 147 CHILD LOCATIVE LANGUAGE phenomena examined here Presumably children have never heard adults uttering fill-content forms; the only fill-content forms that a child has access to are self-generated The faulty semantic representations, which we have independently demonstrated, are the plausible sources for the syntactic Furthermore, a causal relation from semantics to syntax in the errors, acquisition of locative verbs was directly demonstrated in the experiments of Gropen (•989), where verb meaning was manipulated experimentally Children and adults were taught novel verbs in a neutral syntactic context (e.g this is mooping), and then tested on their willingness to produce contentand container-object sentences containing the verbs The meanings of the verbs varied according to whether the content or the container was affected in a particular and salient way (e.g whether the content moved in a zigzagging fashion, or whether the container changed colour) In four experiments children and adults produced relatively more content-object sentences for verbs in which the content changes location in a sa•ent manner, and relatively more container-object sentences for verbs in which the container changes state in a salient way We not claim that the object affectedness rule is sufficient for children to deduce the complex patterns of syntactic behaviour of locative verbs in English and other languages Since human cognition is flexible enough to construe virtually any participant in any event as being 'affected' in, some way, such a rule by itself does not provide enough constraints and could lead to massive overgeneration Rather, at least two layers of knowledge mediate between the linking rule and its application to particular •erbs First, children must learn the broad domain of forms used in a language to express events about transferring contents to or from containers; that is, whether a language has a content-object construction, a container-object construction, whether such constructions admit of oblique arguments, are or both; morphologically marked, and so on There is evidence that children discover this broad semantic domain early and confine their generalizations of the locative alternation within it Bowerman (x982) noted that children not make errors like I read Mary with a book, based on I read a book to Mary, or I ate a spoon into my pudding, based on I ate my pudding with a spoon, presumably because children know that the listener is not a container argument of read and that the instrument is not a content argument of eat But even within the broad domain of content-container verbs, further distinctions must be learned If children applied the linking rule to any verb taking content and container arguments with no further constraints, nothing would prevent them from acquiring and retaining verb meanings in which arbitrary contents and containers are specified as affected For example, how does a speaker of English ever learn that the container is' affected' in instances of splashing (e.g John splashed water onto the dog/splashed the dog with water) but that the contai•ner is not' affected' in instances of spilling (e.g John spilled 148 ACQUISITION the dog with water) Even in the examples examined explanation of why children, inspired by need an we alternating verbs like load or stuff, would not hypothesize a meaning of pour that specified that the container was full or covered with just enough or too much material for its capacity, or a meaning for fill that dictated that the container If they content be poured or inserted in a way appropriate for its syntactic errors even in the did, such meaning representations would license adult state We suggest that the answer is that the child learns to restrict productive extension of the locative alternation within particular narrow, semantically cohesive subclasses of verbs, and avoids generalizing outside these boundaries (see also Levin, •985) For example, verbs that involve forced directed motion of a masslike substance alternate (splash the water/splash the wall; also inject, splatter, spray), but verbs that involve allowing gravity to move a masslike substance not (pour the water/*pour the glass; also spill, ladle, drip) Verbs where the content is almost too large for the intended capacity of the container alternate (stuff feathers into the pillow/stuff the pillow with feathers; also crowd, jam, cram), but verbs without such an implication not (fill, cover) SeE Pinker (I989) and Gropen (I989) for detailed characterizations of such subclasses and their members, and of how their acquisition might help the child determine exactly which verbs can generalize and which must be treated conservatively Interestingly, the object affectedness rule seems to apply at a more abstract level to the question of which narrow subclasses in a language can alternate and which cannot For example, the fact that the subclass of verbs containing brush and smudge alternates but the subclass of verbs containing pour and spill does not may be related to the fact that in the former, the agent is more easily construed as simultaneously and directly acting on the content and container, whereas in the latter, the action does not directly affect the container, but the force of gravity intervenes Furthermore, for some classes there is a degree of interpredictability between the manner in which the content moves and the change of state that the container undergoes, so that both content and container•must be construed as being necessarily affected by the action For example, in stuffing and cramming the forceful nature of the manner is intimately tied to the too-small size and resisting boundaries of the container, whereas for verbs likefill and cover the end-state change allows one to predict less about the nature of the motion or vice-versa In these experiments we not claim to have demonstrated this full set of mechanisms needed to attain adult knowledge of locative verbs But, using a few 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locative alternation,j and that it may play a role both in the genesis of their errors and in their recovery from them Though the linking rule appears... on their willingness to produce contentand container-object sentences containing the verbs The meanings of the verbs varied according to whether the content or the container was affected in a