Projects & Findings
Word learning
Verbs & Event concepts
Toddlers' event conceptualization of verbs
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Computational modeling: My model assumes that the learner only generalize about clause-to-event mappings when exceptions to the generalization are tolerable. It successfully captures how toddlers at different developmental stages conceptualize events with transitive vs. intransitive novel verbs across behavioral studies. [manuscript]
Word Categories
Prosody-functor bootstrapping: Word categories
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Preferential listening: Mandarin-learning 19-month-olds' use utterance-medial functional morphemes (a in XaY sequences) for classifying preceding words (X) as nouns or verbs. We (with Xiaolu Yang, Rushen Shi) found initial evidence for how phrase boundaries might help toddlers resolve distributional uncertainties and succeed in syntactic categorization. (Ying, Yang, & Shi, 2022) [thesis] [abstract]
Figure 1. The model only entertains the hypothesis "verbs describing causative events are used in transitive clauses" at stage 2 (modeling 19-month-olds).
Figure 2. Toddlers use ye (focus particle;也) to categorize nouns and le (aspect marker;了) to categorize verbs. They do not use bu (negation marker; 不) to categorize nouns.