Lexical Specificity and Lexical Acquisition
Date Issued
2009
Date
2009
Author(s)
CHEN, SU-MEI
Abstract
This present study aims to explore the impact of specificity on Mandarin-speaking children’s verb learning process. Tardif (2006) proposed that the typologically higher specificity of Mandarin verbs contributes to the ease of learning and thus leads to higher proportion of Mandarin verbs in early vocabulary. It remains unclear whether Mandarin verbs are more typologically specific, while this study examined the role of specificity in the general mechanism of lexical acquisition. This study aims to explore whether providing children with an additional label to mark a semantic distinction facilitates word learning. In addition, it was also examined whether different labeling patterns would contribute to different strategies for extending novel words. This study manipulated specificity of novel words by providing different labeling patterns for the same visual stimuli. Specificity was thus defined as the presence of labels marking the distinction between two different actions in contrast with a single label for both actions. The experimental conditions included the General Condition and the Specific Condition. In the General Condition, two actions were mapped onto one word whereas in the Specific Condition these actions were mapped onto two words. The main experiment for testing specificity effect can be divided into four phases: (1) the baseline training, (2) the pre-conditioning-training test, (3) the reinforcing conditioning training, and (4) the post-conditioning-training test. In the first phase, all the participants were shown an action labeled by a novel word. In the second phase, they were tested with the aid of video clips. Then came the third phase in which the children were shown with a different but similar action that was labeled by either the same label (in the General Condition) or a different label (in the Specific Condition). Finally, in the fourth phase, the participants were tested for their production and comprehension of the novel words. Children’s production, understanding about semantic distinctions, and the pattern of extending uses of novel words were examined. Sixty 4.5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children participated in this study. Results indicated that children under the Specific Condition were not significantly more likely to produce an additional target word although they heard more words in the training session. They performed poorer on the baseline verb in the post-test than in the pre-test whereas this retrogress was not found in the General Condition. Although children had a robust understanding about specific words, most of them failed to make correct distinction between these specific words. As for extending uses of novel words, results revealed that the training of a general word facilitated extension, yet the training of specific words did not. Additionally, an influence of vocabulary size and order effects were found in the extension task: Children with larger vocabulary and children exposed with a prior training of specific verbs were much less likely to extend novel words to other novel actions. Also, we examined how individual differences affected children’s performance in this particular novel word learning task. Results showed that children with larger vocabulary performed significantly better in the comprehension task than children with smaller vocabulary when learning a general word whereas the difference did not exist when children were presented with specific words. Taken all together, our results supported the view that word learning is a dynamic process in which the semantic boundaries are shaped by children’s language experience.
Subjects
semantic specificity
semantic category
lexical acquisition
lexical development
verb learning
fast mapping
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