Morphological cues vs. number of nominals in learning verb types in Turkish: The syntactic bootstrapping mechanism revisited

Abstract

Abstract The syntactic bootstrapping mechanism of verb learning was evaluated against child-directed speech in Turkish, a language with rich morphology, nominal ellipsis and free word order. Machine-learning algorithms were run on transcribed caregiver speech directed to two Turkish learners (one hour every two weeks between 0;9 to 1;10) of different socioeconomic backgrounds. We found that the number of nominals in child-directed utterances plays a small, but significant, role in classifying transitive and intransitive verbs. Further, we found that accusative morphology on the noun is a strong cue in clustering verb types. We also found that verbal morphology (past tense and bareness of verbs) is useful in distinguishing between different subtypes of intransitive verbs. These results suggest that syntactic bootstrapping mechanisms should be extended to include morphological cues to verb learning in morphologically rich languages. Keywords: Language developmentTurkishChild-directed speechSyntactic bootstrappingMorphology Acknowledgements This work has been supported by the Turkish Academy of Sciences, in the framework of the Young Scientist Award Program granted to Aylin C. Küntay (EA-TÜBA-GEBIP/2001-2-13). Some of the data were collected with the support received by Dr. Sophie Kern from the ‘Origin of Man, Language, and Languages’ (OMLL) program sponsored by the European Science Foundation. A. Engin Ural was supported by TUBITAK-BIDEB 2210 – National Scholarship Program for MSc Students during the final phase of this study. This research would not be possible without the contribution of the participating families and children.