Preemption versus entrenchment : towards a construction-general solution to the problem of the retreat from verb argument structure overgeneralization

Ambridge, Ben and Bidgood, Amy and Twomey, Katherine Elizabeth and Pine, Julian M. and Rowland, Caroline F. and Freudenthal, Daniel (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

[thumbnail of Ambridge, Bidgood, Twomey et al 2016 all const]
Preview
PDF (Ambridge, Bidgood, Twomey et al 2016 all const)
Ambridge_Bidgood_Twomey_et_al_2016_all_const.pdf - Published Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.

Download (963kB)

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:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
PLoS ONE
Additional Information:
© 2015 Ambridge et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1100
Subjects:
?? syntaxlanguage acquisitionconstruction grammar agricultural and biological sciences(all)biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology(all)medicine(all) ??
ID Code:
78571
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
08 Mar 2016 10:16
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
31 Dec 2023 00:39