Semantics of the transitive construction: prototype effects and developmental comparisons.
Journal Article
This paper investigates whether an abstract linguistic construction shows the kind of prototype effects characteristic of non-linguistic categories, in both adults and young children. Adapting the prototype-plus-distortion methodology of Franks and Bransford (1971), we found that whereas adults were lured toward false-positive recognition of sentences with prototypical transitive semantics, young children showed no such effect. We examined two main implications of the results. First, it adds a novel data point to a growing body of research in cognitive linguistics and construction grammar that shows abstract linguistic categories can behave in similar ways to non-linguistic categories, for example, by showing graded membership of a category. Thus, the findings lend psychological validity to the existing cross-linguistic evidence for prototypical transitive semantics. Second, we discuss a possible explanation for the fact that prototypical sentences were processed differently in adults and children, namely, that children's transitive semantic network is not as interconnected or cognitively coherent as adults'.
Full Text
Duke Authors
Cited Authors
- Ibbotson, P; Theakston, AL; Lieven, EVM; Tomasello, M
Published Date
- September 2012
Published In
Volume / Issue
- 36 / 7
Start / End Page
- 1268 - 1288
PubMed ID
- 22591052
Pubmed Central ID
- 22591052
Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)
- 1551-6709
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
- 0364-0213
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
- 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2012.01249.x
Language
- eng