{"pk":49269,"title":"Learning novel intransitive verbs from input cues: Experiments with Mandarin-learning toddlers","subtitle":null,"abstract":"In two novel verb experiments using the visual fixation paradigm, we investigated how Mandarin-learning toddlers employ distributional cues and semantic cues to categorize novel unaccusative and unergative verbs. In Experiment 1, 31-month-old (but not 19-month-old) participants were found to use the word-order cue to categorize two novel verbs VUA and VUE: after hearing \"VUA-le NP\" and \"NP VUE-le\" in the training phase, they categorized VUA as unaccusative and VUE as unergative, showing discrimination in looking times between grammatical trials \"NP VUA-le\" and ungrammatical trials \"VUE-le NP\" in the test phase. In Experiment 2, 31-month-olds used the semantic cue of telicity provided via novel events to make categorizations: watching a telic event paired with \"VUA-le\" and an atelic event paired with \"VUE-le\" led to differentiation between grammatical trials \"VUA-le NP\" and ungrammatical trials \"VUE-le NP\". The findings provide evidence for toddlers' ability to extract information from the input and make generalizations in verb learning.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Linguistics; Language acquisition; Learning; Syntax; Eye tracking"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/17z6k0m5","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Ziqi","middle_name":"","last_name":"Wang","name_suffix":"","institution":"Beijing Institute of Technology","department":""},{"first_name":"Xiaolu","middle_name":"","last_name":"Yang","name_suffix":"","institution":"Tsinghua University","department":""},{"first_name":"Stella","middle_name":"","last_name":"Christie","name_suffix":"","institution":"Tsinghua University","department":""},{"first_name":"Rushen","middle_name":"","last_name":"Shi","name_suffix":"","institution":"UniversitŽ du QuŽbec à MontrŽal","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49269/galley/37230/download/"}]}