Childers and Tomasello (2001) found that training 2 1/2-year-olds on the English transitive construction greatly improves their performance on a post-test in which they must use novel verbs in that construction. In the current study, we replicated Childers and Tomasello's finding, but using a much lower frequency of transitive verbs and models in training. We also used novel verbs that were of ...

introduction        a dialect is a variety of a language used by group of people whose lexicon, syntax, phonetics and phonology are different from those of other people. the existence of many geographical, economic and social barriers among the speakers of a language cause the emergence of many dialects. as such, each language has many dialects and accents and each dialect has many different ac...

Evidence from neuropsychology and neuroimaging implicates parietal and frontal areas of the left cerebral hemisphere in the representation of skills involving the use of tools and other artifacts. On the basis of neuropsychological data, it has been claimed that 1) independent mechanisms within the left hemisphere may support the representation of these skills (transitive actions) versus meanin...

In this paper I examine the types of events associated with ditransitive verbs that describe caused possession by looking at their lexical aspectual properties, a methodology that has proven fruitful for the exploration of (in)transitive verbs. I show that as a whole these ditransitives share a number of aspectual properties in common with (in)transitive verbs of change of state and motion, sug...

A lemma of Tits establishes a connection between the simple connectivity of an incidence geometry and the universal completion of an amalgam induced by a sufficiently transitive group of automorphisms of that geometry. In the present paper, we generalize this lemma to intransitive geometries, thus opening the door for numerous applications. We treat ourselves some amalgams related to intransiti...

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 find that child...

Many studies show a developmental advantage for transitive sentences with familiar verbs over those with novel verbs. It might be that once familiar verbs become entrenched in particular constructions, they would be more difficult to understand (than would novel verbs) in non-prototypical constructions. We provide support for this hypothesis investigating German children using a forced-choice p...