Natural language research announcements

[Margaret Fleck <mfleck AT cs.uiuc.edu>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Fwd: LPBB
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 10:04:36 -0500
From: Sarah Brown-Schmidt 
<brownsch AT uiuc.edu>
 (by way of Judy Allen)
To: Recipient List Suppressed:;

 Our next Brown Bag is next Thursday the 27th at 12:30 in the
afternoon in Beckman 4269. Sylvia Yuan will be presenting and her
talk abstract and title is pasted below.


Sarah

> Here's the information:
>
> Title: "Really? He blicked the cat?": Two-year-olds learn 
> distributional facts about verbs in the absence of a referential 
> context
>
> Abstract:
>
> The syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis proposes that children use 
> syntax to learn verbs. Prior studies involved giving children 
> simultaneous access to a verb's syntactic and referential context. 
> In three experiments, we ask what children learn about a novel verb 
> simply through overhearing its use in sentences. 28-month-olds 
> watched dialogues in which interlocutors used a novel verb in 
> transitive ("Jim blicked the cat! ...") or intransitive sentences 
> ("Jim blicked! ..."). Children then saw two test events: a 
> one-person action and a two-person action. Nouns in the dialogue 
> were not relevant to the test scenes. Upon hearing the verb in 
> isolation ("Find blicking!"), children who had heard transitive 
> sentences looked longer at the two-person action than those who 
> heard intransitive sentences. These and control results suggest that 
> 28-month-olds gather distributional facts about novel verbs, in the 
> absence of a referential scene, and later retrieve them to guide 
> attention to relevant aspects of a referential scene.
>
> Thanks for looking into the speakers!  Let me know if you need 
> anything else from me.
>
> Sylvia