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Ambridge, B, Bidgood, A, Twomey, KE, Pine, JM, Rowland, CF and Freudenthal, D (2015) Preemption versus entrenchment: Towards a construction-general solution to the problem of the retreat from verb argument structure overgeneralization. PLoS ONE, 10 (4). e0123723. ISSN 1932-6203
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Preemption versus Entrenchment Towards a Construction-General Solution to the Problem of the Retreat from Verb Argument Stru.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (960kB) | Preview |
Abstract
Participants aged 5;2-6;8, 9;2-10;6 and 18;1-22;2 (72 at each age) rated verb argument structure overgeneralization errors (e.g., ∗Daddy giggled the baby) using a five-point scale. The study was designed to investigate the feasibility of two proposed construction-general solutions to the question of how children retreat from, or avoid, such errors. No support was found for the prediction of the preemption hypothesis that the greater the frequency of the verb in the single most nearly synonymous construction (for this example, the periphrastic causative; e.g., Daddy made the baby giggle ), the lower the acceptability of the error. Support was found, however, for the prediction of the entrenchment hypothesis that the greater the overall frequency of the verb, regardless of construction, the lower the acceptability of the error, at least for the two older groups. Thus while entrenchment appears to be a robust solution to the problem of the retreat from error, and one that generalizes across different error types, we did not find evidence that this is the case for preemption. The implication is that the solution to the retreat from error lies not with specialized mechanisms, but rather in a probabilistic process of construction competition.
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Uncontrolled Keywords: | Humans; Language Development; Child Language; Verbal Learning; Choice Behavior; Vocabulary; Child; Child, Preschool; Generalization, Psychological; Child; Child Language; Child, Preschool; Choice Behavior; Generalization, Psychological; Humans; Language Development; Verbal Learning; Vocabulary; General Science & Technology |
| Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics |
| Divisions: | Psychology (from Sep 2019) |
| Publisher: | Public Library of Science (PLoS) |
| SWORD Depositor: | A Symplectic |
| Date Deposited: | 04 Aug 2022 11:07 |
| Last Modified: | 04 Aug 2022 11:15 |
| DOI or ID number: | 10.1371/journal.pone.0123723 |
| URI: | https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/17343 |
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