Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 1 of 1
Full-Text Articles in Psychology
Contingencies Between Verbs, Body Parts, And Argument Structures In Maternal And Child Speech: A Corpus Study, Josita Maouene, Mounir Maouene, Nitya Sethuraman, Sango Otieno
Contingencies Between Verbs, Body Parts, And Argument Structures In Maternal And Child Speech: A Corpus Study, Josita Maouene, Mounir Maouene, Nitya Sethuraman, Sango Otieno
Dr. Josita C Maouene
Prior work on argument structure development has shown connections between abstract verb meaning and argument structure; neuroimaging and behavioral studies have shown connections between verb meaning and body effectors. Here we examine the contingencies between verbs, their most likely body region pairing, and argument structure. We ask whether the verbs used in six common syntactic frames are specifically linked to one of three main regions of the body: head, arm, leg. The speech of 20-month-olds (N = 67), 28-month-olds (N = 27), and their mothers (N = 54) (CHILDES: MacWhinney, 2000) was examined for the use of early-learned verbs (MCDI: …