36.246, FYI: STAL Seminar: JANUARY 20, 14:30 CET: Kristen Syrett & Misha Becker, "How Language Supports the Acquisition of Predicates of Mental States and Emotions"

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-246. Fri Jan 17 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.246, FYI: STAL Seminar: JANUARY 20, 14:30 CET: Kristen Syrett & Misha Becker, "How Language Supports the Acquisition of Predicates of Mental States and Emotions"

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Date: 17-Jan-2025
From: Dan Zeman [danczeman at gmail.com]
Subject: STAL Seminar: JANUARY 20, 14:30 CET: Kristen Syrett & Misha Becker, "How Language Supports the Acquisition of Predicates of Mental States and Emotions"


The Slurring Terms Across Languages (STAL) network
(https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/home) invites you to a talk
by Kristen Syrett (Rutgers University) & Misha Becker (University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill) entitled "How Language Supports the
Acquisition of Predicates of Mental States and Emotions". The talk
will take place online on JANUARY 20, 14:30-16:00 Central European
Time (CET) and is part of the of STAL network seminar series
(https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/seminar). If you want to
participate, please write to stalnetwork at gmail.com for the Zoom link.
Below you can find the abstract.
All welcome!
ABSTRACT:
As children acquire adjectives, they must tackle the challenge that
while some properties denoted by these predicates are stable and
visually salient (e.g., color, shape), others (e.g., emotions and
mental states like happy, sad, or confident) lack a reliable physical
correlate, and are typically only inferable via second order
characteristics. How, then, do children master the meanings of
adjectives that label these fleeting, internal, abstract states? One
answer may lie in the very linguistic environment in which these
adjectives appear. Previous work in language acquisition has
documented the power of the frame and complementation patterns for
verb learning, subject form for control and raising verbs, count
syntax for acquiring nouns, and adverbial modification for different
types of gradable adjectives. In this talk, I draw on this prior work
to lay a foundation for a series of experiments investigating how
children might recruit both syntactic and semantic cues in the input
to narrow the hypothesis space for emotion/mental state adjective
meaning. I begin by presenting extensive evidence from CHILDES corpora
showing that while these adjectives are relatively infrequent in the
input, they diverge from other adjectives (e.g., those of color,
shape, size, or multidimensional subjective adjectives) in their
preference of syntactic position, their requirements on subject
animacy, and their syntactic complementation patterns. Next, I present
data from a set of word guessing studies using scripted dialogues that
both adults and older children (age 5-8) recruit the type of subject
and syntactic complement to constrain adjective meaning. Finally, I
present a set of binary forced-choice word learning studies putting
emotion/mental state against color and shape showing once again, that
the presence of an animate subject and syntactic complement points to
an emotion/mental state adjective meaning, this time for preschoolers.
Taken together, these experiments—the first to document the combined
power of syntax and semantics for acquiring abstract adjective
meaning—make connections between emotion/mental state adjectives and
mental state verbs in word learning, thereby further demonstrating the
potential universality of syntactic bootstrapping, and the role of
language itself in focusing young word learners’ attention on mental
aspects of the situation that are not readily observable.

Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition
                     Philosophy of Language
                     Semantics
                     Syntax




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