Processing Intransitive Verbs: How Do Children Differ from Adults?

ABSTRACT

Previous studies have demonstrated that, for adults, differences between unaccusative verbs (e.g., “fall”) and unergative verbs (e.g., “dance”) lead to a difference in processing. However, so far we don’t know whether this effect shows up in children’s processing of these verbs as well. This study measures children’s processing of intransitive verbs using the Visual World Paradigm. We found that children differentiate in processing between unaccusative and unergative verbs, yet in a different way than adults do. We identify and discuss potential sources for this difference.

Acknowledgments

We thank Marijke van der Linden for her help in creating the stimuli and Marijke van der Linden, Janna Brummel, Vanja de Lint, and Sophia Manika for their help in running the experiment. Many thanks also go to Theo Veenker and Warmolt Tonckens for their technical support. We would like to thank Arnout Koornneef, Jeff Runner, Ken Wexler, and Frank Wijnen for helpful discussion as well as Hugo Quené and Huub van den Bergh for discussing the statistical analysis. Finally, we are greatly indebted to three reviewers, as well as the journal editor, for valuable comments that significantly improved the article.

Funding

The research reported was made possible by a grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO, Nr. 021.001.087) to L.K. We are particularly grateful to the children and teachers from Montessorischool Bilthoven for participation in our experiment.

Notes

¹ An alternative way to understand this is that sentences with unergative verbs are compatible with a default parse in which the subject NP is the VP-external argument, whereas sentences with unaccusative verbs are not. As such, sentences with unaccusative verbs require a reanalysis during processing that unergative verbs do not require. Argument-verb integration can only take place after the alternative structure has been computed (see Koring et al., 2012).

² A way of capturing this in a derivational approach is to say that roots like “break” are both compatible with an unaccusative (intransitive voice) structure and a structure with transitive voice.

³ As such, another useful diagnostic in determining unaccusativity in Dutch is the possibility to add the modifier vanzelf “by itself” in the meaning of “without outside help” (for English see Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 1995; Reinhart, 2000, 2016). The without-outside-help reading identifies a cause, and is therefore possible for unaccusative verbs as in (i), but not for unergative verbs as in (ii). Notice that this is not a matter of animacy. The without-outside-help reading is also impossible for so-called theme unergative verbs like glitter in (iii) that assign the role of theme to their argument, yet the argument is an external argument.

1. Ik deed niets, de sleutel viel vanzelfI didn’t do anything, the key fell by itself

2. #Ik deed niets, de bruid danste vanzelf#I didn’t do anything, the bride danced by herself

3. #Ik deed niets, de diamant glinsterde vanzelf.#I didn’t do anything, the diamond glittered by itself.

⁴ In a Cross-Modal Priming experiment, unaccusative verbs that allow for a transitive alternate did not give rise to a clear reactivation pattern like unaccusative verbs without such an alternate (Friedmann et al., 2008). In fact, the alternating unaccusative verbs presented a mixed set with some verbs behaving like unaccusative verbs, some verbs like unergative verbs, and some verbs different from both verb types. Yet, it is unclear to us what the significance of a verb-by-verb analysis is. Furthermore, the diagnostics used to select alternating unaccusative verbs do not seem to pick out a unified set of verbs.

⁵ Some of the filler visual displays just contained one visual object in order to make it look more like a movie clip.

⁶ This also caused the difference in the linear component. Overall, the unergative verbs displayed more of a negative slope, because the unaccusative verbs have a late rise at the end of the time frame.

⁷ In fact, the mere presence of a conceptualized cause might activate a transitive structure. Alternatively, a default parse with an external argument position that needs to be suppressed might be active.

¹ This seems to be less of a problem with lme4, but it still varies per optimizer.

² Bates et al. provides tools to explore whether including it is justified or not for a particular dataset. This involves checking how much variance each random effect accounts for with a Principal Components Analysis, using the RePsychLing package in R.

Additional information

Funding

The research reported was made possible by a grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO, Nr. 021.001.087) to L.K. We are particularly grateful to the children and teachers from Montessorischool Bilthoven for participation in our experiment.