The Acquisition of the Lexicon

510 Pages·1994·2.39 MB·English

by  Lila Gleitman and Barbara Landau (Editors)

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title: The Acquisition of the Lexicon
author: Gleitman, Lila R.
publisher: MIT Press
isbn10 | asin: 0262571099
print isbn13: 9780262571098
ebook isbn13: 9780585026602
language: English
subject Language acquisition, Vocabulary, Semantics.
publication date: 1994
lcc: P118.A143 1994eb
ddc: 401/.93
subject: Language acquisition, Vocabulary, Semantics.
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The Acquisition of the Lexicon
edited by Lila Gleitman and Barbara Landau
A Bradford Book
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England

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Second printing, 1996
First MIT Press edition, 1994
© 1994 Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam, the Netherlands
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including
photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
Reprinted from Lingua: International Review of General Linguistics, Volume 92, Nos. 14, April 1994. The MIT Press has
exclusive license to sell this English-language book edition throughout the world.
Printed and bound in the United States of America. This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The acquisition of the lexicon / edited by Lila Gleitman and Barbara Landau. 1st MIT
Press ed.
p. cm.
"A Bradford book."
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-57109-9
1. Language acquisition. 2. Vocabulary. 3. Semantics. I. Gleitman, Lila R. II. Landau,
Barbara, 1949
P118.A143 1994
401'.93dc20
94-28973
CIP

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Contents
Preface (L. Gleitman and B. Landau) 1
Section 1: Nature of the mental lexicon
E. Williams, Remarks on lexical knowledge 7
B. Levin and M. Rappaport Hovav, A preliminary analysis of
causative verbs in English 35
Section 2: Discovering the word units
A. Cutler, Segmentation problems, rhythmic solutions 81
M.H. Kelly and S. Martin, Domain-general abilities applied
to domain- specific tasks: Sensitivity to probabilities in
perception, cognition, and language 105
Section 3: Categorizing the world
S. Carey, Does learning a language require the child to
reconceptualize the world? 143
F.C. Keil, Explanation, association, and the acquisition of
word meaning 169
Section 4: Categories, words, and language
E.M. Markman, Constraints on word meaning in early
language acquisition 199
S.R. Waxman, The development of an appreciation of
specific linkages between linguistic and conceptual
organization 229

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Page vi
B. Landau,Where's what and what's where: The language of
objectsin space 259
P. Bloom,Possible names: The role of syntax-semantics
mappings in the acquisition of nominals 297
Section 5: The case of verbs
C. Fisher, D.G. Hall, S. Rakowitz and L. Gleitman,When it is
better to receive than to give: Syntactic and conceptual
constraints on vocabulary growth 333
S. Pinker,How could a child use verb syntax to learn verb
semantics? 377
J. Grimshaw,Lexical reconciliation 411
Section 6: Procedures for verb learning
M.R. Brent,Surface cues and robust inference as a basis for
the early acquisition of subcategorization frames 433
M. Steedman,Acquisition of verb categories 471
Index 481

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Page 1
Preface
For many years, the topic of lexical acquisition was a stepchild in linguistic inquiry. While the acquisition of syntax was
acknowledged to be organized according to a set of deep and highly structured innate principles, word meanings were assumed
to be acquired by a simple and particularistic associative procedure that mapped perceptual experience onto phonetic entities.
We believe this stance was anomalous from the start, as had been pointed out eloquently by Plato and, in modern times, by
Quine. Not all words are perceptually based; even those that are map quite abstractly from perceptual categories; and neither
perception nor learning is 'simple'. During the past decade, it has become clear from linguistic inquiry that the lexicon is more
highly structured than heretofore thought; moreover, that much of grammar turns on critical and universal links between
syntactic and lexical-semantic phenomena.
Hence the present volume. The papers grew out of a workshop held at the University of Pennsylvania. Its aim was to bring
together psychologists, computer scientists, and linguists whose joint concern was the lexicon and its acquisition; these
researchers have typically worked quite separately and on problems thought to be disparate. The volume is organized in six
sections:
1.
Nature of the mental lexicon: The two essays that open the collection are from
linguists gleaning general perspectives on lexical learning from the linguistic facts
themselves. The first, by Edwin Williams, argues from the real complexity and
idiosyncratic nature of the mental lexicon (including lexical phrases) that innate
linguistic and categorization principles are not enough, that real children require a
learning theory more sophisticated than usually has been supposed. A detailed
analysis of English causative alternation verbs by Levin and Hovav eloquently
supports Williams on the complexity of lexical structure.
2.Discovering the word units: To acquire a vocabulary, the learner requires some
procedures for segmenting the continuously varying sound wave into word-sized
pieces. Cutler discusses this problem, presenting evidence that a bias toward
rhythmic alternation serves as a powerful bootstrap for infants (and adults, whatever
their specific language background) solving this problem. Kelly and Martin then
show that, armed with such biases, learners

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Page 2
exploit multiple probabilistic cues to discover the word units: domain-general
learning procedures can be used to discover many domain-specific facts about
language.
3.Categorizing the world: The word meaning culled from children's interaction with
the world ultimately depends on how they represent their observations. A first
question is whether children's mental representations (categories, and the theories
that bind them) are the same, no matter the age of the learner. In her article, Carey
makes a strong case for a 'discontinuity' theory, in which the very basis of inference
from observation onto meaning-identification changes over developmental time.
Keil, in contrast, argues that the mentalities of children and adults hardly differ. For
both, his view is that concept and word acquisition involves both the discovery of
multiple probabilistic surface factors (reminiscent of Kelly and Martin) and some
theory-driven generalizations.
4.Categories, words, and language: A further set of articles again documents how the
child uses the evidence of observation to decide on a word's meaning. But these
emphasize the role of linguistic principles as an additional determining factor. Thus
Markman points out that the learner is biased toward a 'whole object' assumption a
new word probably names the whole animal rather than one of its parts or properties.
But then how could a child learn 'nose' or 'white'? She provides evidence for a
linguistic principle ('mutual exclusivity') that leads children to avoid two labels for
the same object. Waxman shows experimentally that such biases, even in the toddler,
are specifically related to the characteristic semantic properties typical of lexical
classes nouns name objects but adjectives name properties. Landau shows how the
separation and respective structures of the 'what' and 'where' systems (as documented
by neuropsychologists) are related, in learning, to the child's acquisition of object
names vs. place expressions. All these articles are neutral concerning the direction of
the causal links here: the extent to which the perceptual-conceptual facts determine
lexical class assignment, or the other way round. Bloom takes a stronger view in
discussing the acquisition of nominal subtypes (count vs. mass noun, noun phrase):
He holds that very early in life children consider syntactic form class as relevant to
determining a novel word's meaning.
5.The case of verbs: The papers mentioned thus far make a strong case that the form-
meaning linkages that typify language design are exploited by children acquiring the
vocabulary of their native tongue. Grimshaw (1981) and Pinker (1984) emphasized,
on the basis of these linkages, that children could derive lexical class assignment
from experience-based learning of the

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Page 3
word's meaning; Pinker showed further that such a procedure would be marvelously
useful for the construction of phrase structure ('semantic bootstrapping'). Landau and
Gleitman (1985) emphasized that learning might sometimes, even usually, be the
other way round; specifically, that syntactic structure plays a necessary role in
narrowing the search space for verb meanings ('syntactic bootstrapping'). The three
articles in this section hotly debate how the semantics-syntax links (specifically, the
relation between verb argument structures and subcategorization structures) are
implicated in the learning process for verbs. Fisher, Hall, Rakowtiz, and Gleitman
emphasize the role of syntax in narrowing the range of interpretations made
available by experience; Pinker argues that logically the child must work from
experience to determine the syntax in the first place; and Grimshaw stalwartly
proposes a reconciliation of these two views.
6.Procedures for verb learning: The positions just described, even if correct, can
suggest only some boundary conditions on a learning theory for verbs. Fisher et al.,
as just described, assert that some rudiments of syntax are necessary for learning the
verb meanings. But as Pinker points out, the question then would be: How did the
child acquire the syntax if not by exploiting the word meanings themselves? Brent,
in the best tradition of computer science, offers a discovery procedure for verb
subcategorization that uses string-local surface cues only, and does surprisingly well.
The final article in the volume, from Steedman, was designed as a specific
commentary on Brent's work. But this short article is much more general than that. It
strikes a number of sane cautionary notes about current theories of verb learning, of
which the most important is that real acquisition is bound to be a messy business,
with syntactic, semantic, and prosodic cues recruited by the child more or less catch-
as-catch-can. Steedman also points out, in what we find an appropriately laudatory
comment, that it is only in the presence of explicit computational models such as
Brent's that the bootstrapping theories can ever be developed and seriously
evaluated.
It is the hope of the editors that this compendium of topics and views on lexical learning will be of particular use to the linguists
who constitute the Lingua audience, in two ways. First, we suppose it will be useful to see the kinds of methodological and
substantive contributions that scientific psychology can make to the question of language learning and hence to the theory of
language. Second as we have emphasized earlier because syntactic and lexical structure are so closely entwined, we expect that
the various articles will be informative as to how these linkages enter into the learning procedure for vocabulary.

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Page 4
We thank Lingua for the opportunity to air these works in this Special Issue, and we particularly thank the Lingua Chief Editor.
Teun Hoekstra, for this continuing aid and support of this project. We thank also the National Science Foundation which,
through an STC grant to the University of Pennsylvania Institute for Research in Cognitive science, made the Workshop
possible. In that regard, we are especially grateful to the staff of IRCS (Trisha Yanuzzi and Chris Sandy) and to Carol Miller,
Kimberly Cassidy, and Sally Davis (graduate students in the Department of Psychology) who ran the Workshop with verve,
efficiency, and considerable good humor. Finally, we thank Steven and Marcia Roth for a grant to Lila Gleitman which aided us
in the preparation of the Volume.
Philadelphia, June 1993
Lila Gleitman
Barbara Landau

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Page 5
Section 1
Nature of the mental lexicon

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