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Semantics of the Transitive Construction: Prototype Effects and Developmental Comparisons
Author(s) -
Ibbotson Paul,
Theakston Anna L.,
Lieven Elena V. M.,
Tomasello Michael
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2012.01249.x
Subject(s) - transitive relation , semantics (computer science) , linguistics , psychology , cognition , construction grammar , grammar , point (geometry) , computer science , cognitive psychology , artificial intelligence , mathematics , philosophy , geometry , combinatorics , neuroscience , programming language
This paper investigates whether an abstract linguistic construction shows the kind of prototype effects characteristic of non‐linguistic categories, in both adults and young children. Adapting the prototype‐plus‐distortion methodology of Franks and Bransford (1971), we found that whereas adults were lured toward false‐positive recognition of sentences with prototypical transitive semantics, young children showed no such effect. We examined two main implications of the results. First, it adds a novel data point to a growing body of research in cognitive linguistics and construction grammar that shows abstract linguistic categories can behave in similar ways to non‐linguistic categories, for example, by showing graded membership of a category. Thus, the findings lend psychological validity to the existing cross‐linguistic evidence for prototypical transitive semantics. Second, we discuss a possible explanation for the fact that prototypical sentences were processed differently in adults and children, namely, that children’s transitive semantic network is not as interconnected or cognitively coherent as adults’.