Japanese Two-Year-Olds Use Morphosyntax to Learn Novel Verb Meanings.

ABSTRACT Previous research has found that children who are acquiring argument-droplanguagessuchasTurkishandChinesemakeuseofsyntacticframestoextendfamiliarverbmeanings(Go ¨ksun,KuntayNLee& Naigles, 2008). This article investigates whether two-year-olds learn-ing Japanese, another argument-drop language, make use of argumentnumber and case markings in learning novel verbs. Children watchedvideos of novel causative and non-causative actions via IntermodalPreferential Looking. The novel verbs were presented in transitive orintransitive frames; the NPs in the transitive frames appeared ‘bare’ orwithcasemarkers.ConsistentwithpreviousfindingsofMorphosyntacticBootstrapping,childrenwhoheardthenovelverbsinthetransitiveframewith case markers reliably assigned those verbs to the novel causativeactions. [*] We would like to thank all the nurseries and children who participated in the study. Webenefited from useful discussions with Kerstin Abbot-Smith and Aylin Ku¨ntay. Thisstudy was funded by Economic and Social Research Council in the UK (RES-000-22-1398). Address for correspondence: e-mail: a.matsuo@sheffield.ac.ukJ. Child Lang. 39 (2012), 637–663.