Published March 29, 2023
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Children learn ergative case marking in Hindi using statistical preemption and clause-level semantics (intentionality): evidence from acceptability judgment and elicited production studies with children and adults
Creators
- 1. School of Health and Social Care,, University of Essex, Colchester, Essex, CO4 3SQ, UK
- 2. School of Psychological Science, University of Bristol, Bristol, BS8 1TU, UK
- 3. Department of Linguistics,, University of Colorado, Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, 80309, USA
- 4. Language Technologies Research Centre, International Institute of Information Technology-Hyderabad, Gachibowli, Hyderbabad, 500032, India
- 5. Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Hauz Khas, New Delhi, 110016, India
- 6. Department of Computer Science, Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Educational and Research Institute, Belur Math, Howrah, West Bengal, 711202, India
- 7. ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD), International, UK
Description
Background: A question that lies at the very heart of language acquisition research is how children learn semi-regular systems with exceptions (e.g., the English plural rule that yields cats, dogs, etc, with exceptions feet and men). We investigated this question for Hindi ergative ne marking; another semi-regular but exception-filled system. Generally, in the past tense, the subject of two-participant transitive verbs (e.g., Ram broke the cup) is marked with ne, but there are exceptions. How, then, do children learn when ne marking is required, when it is optional, and when it is ungrammatical?
Methods: We conducted two studies using (a) acceptability judgment and (b) elicited production methods with children (aged 4-5, 5-6 and 9-10 years) and adults.
Results: All age groups showed effects of statistical preemption: the greater the frequency with which a particular verb appears with versus without ne marking on the subject – relative to other verbs – the greater the extent to which participants (a) accepted and (b) produced ne over zero-marked subjects. Both children and adults also showed effects of clause-level semantics, showing greater acceptance of ne over zero-marked subjects for intentional than unintentional actions. Some evidence of semantic effects at the level of the verb was observed in the elicited production task for children and the judgment task for adults.
Conclusions: participants mainly learn ergative marking on an input-based verb-by-verb basis (i.e., via statistical preemption; verb-level semantics), but are also sensitive to clause-level semantic considerations (i.e., the intentionality of the action). These findings add to a growing body of work which suggests that children learn semi-regular, exception-filled systems using both statistics and semantics.
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