CNL Lunch Talks

Kristen Syrett
Department of Linguistics
Northwestern University

Thursday Nov 16th 2006, 12:30 PM, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

Adverbs highlight adjectives and object properties for 2.5-year-olds

Although it is not until almost 2 years of age that infants consistently map adjectives onto object properties, by age 3, they exhibit a near adult-like level of semantic sophistication with respect to distinctions among adjectives. In this talk, I focus on one distinction in particular, the relative/context-dependent versus absolute scalar distinction within gradable adjectives. After briefly discussing children's ability to distinguish between these subclasses of gradable adjectives, I ask how infants could have acquired this knowledge in the first place. I will present evidence from a corpus search that the input provides systematic cues to these distinctions in the form of adverbial modification. I then turn to experimental results from a study with 2.5-year-olds employing the preferential looking paradigm that demonstrate that infants can use such adverbial modification when assigning an interpretation to novel adjectives. These results suggest that by highlighting adjectives in the input and differences among object properties, adverbs play a role in word learning and can help children master the semantics of adjectives.