WHEN IT IS BETTER TO RECEIVE THAN TO GIVE - SYNTACTIC AND CONCEPTUAL CONSTRAINTS ON VOCABULARY GROWTH

We ask how children solve the mapping problem for verb acquistion: how they pair concepts with their phonological realizations in their lang uage. There is evidence that nouns but not verbs can be acquired by pa iring each sound (e.g., 'elephant') with a concept inferred from the w orld circumstances in which that sound occurs. Verb meanings pose prob lems for this word-world mapping procedure, motivating a model of verb mapping mediated by attention to the syntactic structures in which ve rbs occur (Landau and Gleitman 1985, Gleitman 1990). We present an exp eriment examining the interaction between a conceptual influence (the bias to interpret observed situations as involving a causal agent) and syntactic influences, as these jointly contribute to children's conje ctures about new verb meanings. Children were shown scenes ambiguous a s to two interpretations (e.g., giving and getting or chasing and flee ing) and were asked to guess the meaning of novel verbs used to descri be the scenes, presented in varying syntactic contexts. Both conceptua l and syntactic constraints influenced children's responses, but synta ctic information largely overwhelmed the conceptual bias. This finding , with collatoral evidence, supports a syntax-mediated procedure for v erb acquisition.