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Biomedical subjects

Adele E Goldberg

Publications and source records attributed to Adele E Goldberg.

4 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2005

The role of prediction in construction-learning.

It is well-established that (non-linguistic) categorization is driven by a functional demand of prediction. We suggest that prediction likewise may well play a role in motivating the learning of semantic generalizations about argument structure constructions. We report corpora statistics that indicate that the argument frame or construction has roughly equivalent cue validity as a predictor of overall sentence meaning as the morphological form of the verb, and has greater category validity. That is, the construction is at least as reliable and more available than the verb. Moreover, given the fact that many verbs have quite low cue validity in isolation, attention to the contribution of the construction is essential.

Child Language↗
PubMed2005

Fast mapping between a phrasal form and meaning.

This is the first study to investigate experimentally how children come to learn mappings between novel phrasal forms and novel meanings: a central task in learning a language. Two experiments are reported. In both studies 5- to 7-year-old children watched a short set of video clips depicting objects appearing in various ways. Each scene was described using a novel verb embedded in a novel construction. Children who watched the videos and heard the accompanying description were able to match new descriptions that used the novel construction with new scenes of appearance. Moreover, our results suggest a facilitative effect for the disproportionately high frequency of occurrence of a single verb in a particular construction (such as has been found to exist in naturalistic input to children). While the fast mapping might be taken as an indication of innate knowledge that is specific to language, analogous effects in non-linguistic categorization tasks suggest that children are acquiring the new phrasal form with general cognitive skills.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed2003

Can thematic roles leave traces of their places?

An important question in the study of language production is the nature of the semantic information that speakers use to create syntactic structures. A common answer to this question assumes that thematic roles help to mediate the mapping from messages to syntax. However, research using structural priming has suggested that the construction of syntactic frames may be insensitive to variations in thematic roles within messages (Cognition 35 (1990) 1; Psychological Review 99 (1992) 150). Because these studies involved structural alternations whose syntax covaries with the order of thematic roles, it is difficult to assess any independent contribution that role information may make to the positioning of phrases. In this study, we primed the order of the roles without changing the syntactic structure of the sentences produced, and found that the order of the roles was influenced by the priming manipulation. This implies that thematic roles or the features that differentiate them are active within the mapping between messages and sentence structures.

Adolescent↗