Uziel-Karl, S. 1 & Sethuraman, N. 2
1 Ono Academic College
2 University of Michigan - Dearborn
Research findings have shown that speakers tend to connect verbs to a core meaning (giving is about HAND) (Maouene, et al., 2008), and independently, that, verb meaning and argument structure are linked (Gleitman, 1990; Naigles, 1990). The present study examines whether there is a strong, consistent link between a verb, a body-part denoting the action, and a specific argument structure frame (e.g. give- HAND- V NP). This is, perhaps, the first study to examine the relevance of body parts for early syntactic aquisition cross-linguistically. To this end, we examined longitudinal naturalistic speech samples of two native Hebrew-speakers and two native English-speakers between the ages 1;6-3;0 (CHILDES, MacWhinney, 2000) for uses of ten highly frequent verbs that had strong body part associations in each language. A total of 2,954 verb-containing utterances (Hebrew, N = 1,223; English, N = 1,731) were analyzed. Each verb was coded for body part association and for its different argument structure frames. Analysis reveals highly similar cross-linguistic patterns of association between verbs, body parts and argument structures: 1. Verbs associated with LEG (go, come) most often occur in intransitive constructions with a locative (Hebrew: 43%, English: 52%); 2. Verbs associated with HEAD (see, look, know, read) and HAND (get, make, put) tend to occur in transitive constructions (V NP: Hebrew: HEAD: 21%; HAND: 32%; English: HEAD: 38%; HAND: 60%); 3. Verbs associated with HEAD and LEG occur as bare verbs more often than verbs associated with HAND (V: Hebrew: HEAD: 34%; LEG: 52% vs. HAND: 17%; English: HEAD: 33%; LEG: 30% vs. HAND: 6%). Prior research has focused on the importance of linguistic cues over real-world observational cues for learning early verbs and syntax. Here we suggest that, in addition to abstract linguistic cues, body parts may contribute to children's acquisition of verb argument structures.