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<Paper uid="W04-1310">
  <Title>69 On a possible role for pronouns in the acquisition of verbs</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="73" end_page="74" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
4 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We have shown that there are statistical regularities in co-occurrences between pronouns and verbs in the speech that children hear from their parents. We have also shown that a simple statistical learner can learn these regularities, including subtle higher-order regularities that are not obvious in a casual glance at the input data, and use them to predict the verb in an incomplete sentence. How might this help children learn  verbs? In the first place, hearing a verb framed by pronouns may help the child isolate the verb itselfhaving simple, short consistent, and high-frequency slot fillers could make it that much easier to segment the relevant word in frames like He ___ it. Second, the information provided by the particular pronouns that are used in a given utterance might help the child isolate the relevant event or action from the blooming, buzzing confusion around itin English, pronouns can indicate animacy, gender and number, and their order can indicate temporal or causal direction or sequence (e.g., You ___ it versus It ___ you).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Finally, if we suppose that the child has already learned one verb and its pattern of correlations with pronouns, and then hears another verb being used with the same or a similar pattern of correlations, the child may hypothesize that the unknown verb is similar to the known verb. For example, a child who understood want but not need might observe that you is usually the subject of both and conclude that want, like need, has to do with his desires and not, for example, a physical motion or someone elses state of mind. The pronoun/verb co-occurrences in the input may thus help the child narrow down the class to which an unknown verb belongs, allowing the learner to focus on further refining her grasp of the verb through subsequent exposures.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Whether children are actually sensitive to these regularities remains an open question. To the extent that children have actually picked up on the regularities, two predictions should follow. The first is that childrens utterances should exhibit roughly the same co-occurrence patterns as we found in their parents speech to them. Therefore, the next step in our research is to determine whether children are using pronouns and verbs together with roughly the same frequencies that they hear in their parents speech. This is the subject of research in progress using the coded corpus data from Experiment 1. Because our hypothesis concerns broad-class verb acquisition, we are focusing on children younger than the age of 3, by which time most children can produce the most common verbs (Dale and Fenson, 1996).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The second prediction that follows from the hypothesis that children might be sensitive to the regularities demonstrated in this paper is that childrens comprehension of ordinary verbs should be better when they are used in frames that are consistent with the regularities in the input than when they are used in frames that are inconsistent with those regularities. Assessing whether this is true requires an experiment testing childrens comprehension of real but relatively infrequent verbs in two conditions: a consistent condition (in which the verb is used with nouns or pronouns that are consistent with the regularities in the corpus) and an inconsistent condition (in which the verb is used with nouns or pronouns that are inconsistent with the regularities in the corpus). This experiment is in the planning stages.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Even if children are sensitive to the regularities, this knowledge might not help them learn new verbs. That is, whether these regularities actually play a role in language acquisition also remains an open question. To the extent that they do, a third prediction follows: children should be better able to generalize comprehension of novel verbs when they are presented in frames consistent with these regularities. We are designing an experiment to test this hypothesis.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> The argument that the frequency of pronouns and their co-occurrences with verb classes play a role in the acquisition of verbs could be strengthened by showing that it is true in many languages. The present study considered only English, which is a relatively noun-heavy language in which argument ellipsis is rare. Some other languages, by contrast, tend to emphasize verbs and frequently drop nominal arguments. We are especially keen to find out what sorts of cues children might be using to identify verb classes in such languages. Hence, work is underway to collect comparable data from Japanese and Tamil, verb-heavy languages with frequent argument dropping and case-marked pronouns reflecting various degrees of social status.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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