I'll never grow up: continuity in aspect representations
-
Laura Wagner
Abstract
Children's early production typically favors prototypical groupings of temporal-aspectual features; children prefer to say telic, perfective, past combinations (e.g., broke) and atelic, imperfective present combinations (e.g., riding). The current experiments examine the extent to which adults also favor these prototypical groups in a comprehension task (Experiment 1) and a sentence comparison task (Experiment 2). The results show that, like children, adults find prototypical combinations easier to understand, particularly in low-information contexts. Moreover, adults judge prototypical combinations as better sentences than nonprototypical sentences. The results are argued to support continuity in aspectual representations. The differences between children and adults is linked to the proposed origin of the prototypes themselves, namely, information processing demands.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Artikel in diesem Heft
- I'll never grow up: continuity in aspect representations
- Acquisition of aspect in self-organizing connectionist models
- Subcategorization pattern and lexical meaning of motion verbs: a study of the source/goal ambiguity
- Apparent subject-object inversion in Chinese
- ‘Again’ and ‘again’: a grammatical analysis of you and zai in Mandarin Chinese
- Theory and Typology of Proper Names, by Willy Van Langendonck
- Publications received between 2 June 2008 and 1 June 2009
Artikel in diesem Heft
- I'll never grow up: continuity in aspect representations
- Acquisition of aspect in self-organizing connectionist models
- Subcategorization pattern and lexical meaning of motion verbs: a study of the source/goal ambiguity
- Apparent subject-object inversion in Chinese
- ‘Again’ and ‘again’: a grammatical analysis of you and zai in Mandarin Chinese
- Theory and Typology of Proper Names, by Willy Van Langendonck
- Publications received between 2 June 2008 and 1 June 2009
